Once Upon A Dream
by kleosaphthit0n
Summary: A/N: The section breaks disappeared :( but it's corrected now so give it another shot! It should flow much better now. Sorry! Where Loki was right about Teddy and the universe conspired to erase Billy Kaplan's blasphemy from every corner of reality. (A/N: Adam is not an OC.) Always trying to be a better writer so all feedback, good or bad, are welcome and desired.
1. Adam

**Adam**

The man who entered the café looked much younger than Adam had expected and was cunningly disguised besides. It would have been easy to mistake him for a drifter or a pirate, both easily overlooked in Lowtown, if you didn't know how to look. Sweat-stained shirt, ratty coat, dusty cargos. He even got the _smell_ right—just the proper mix of sweat, piss, and alcohol. The sort of bum that the privileged eye liked to pretend not to see. You wouldn't think him dangerous but you'd feel it, just an uncanny itch by the margins of your skin or a terrible auguring behind your neck. An almost-sound telling you to get up and leave. Terror and excitement settled in Adam's stomach, tying it in knots, as the man's somber gray eyes found his across the room.

"Last time I met a man for coffee, I put steel pipes through his mouth," the man said casually, casting suspicious glances about. He dragged a chair opposite Adam and offered him a warm smile. A few tables away, a fat Saudi man gave them a curious look before turning back to his newspaper.

"Must have been some terrible java," Adam said unimpressed, rising from his seat to offer his hand. "How are you, Jacob?"

The man grinned and grabbed Adam's hand, giving it a single hearty tug with a bony hand of his own. "Tired, as always. So many people asking for things, as if I don't have my own affairs to settle. I've people to hunt down too you know, vengeances to exact," Jacob said as he plopped heavily on his chair. He leaned back and stared at Adam through sunken eyes. Outside, the harsh afternoon sun bore down on Madripoor, carving deep shadows across Jacob's bald profile and making him look very much like a living skull. "And the girl? She is well?"

"Yeah. Tougher than she seemed," Adam replied.

"Good. That's good."

Adam waited but the other man did not seem inclined to add anything more. "So. Vengeances and affairs to take care of… This is why you're doing the drop off in person this time?"

"I can't leave without seeing you; it's bad form to never meet a client face to face. And I thought you'd want to hear personally from me that the Wolverine is truly dead. Saw the remains myself."

Adam grew cold at the mention of the name. "Good," he said with a hard edge to his voice. "How?"

Jacob waved an impatient hand. "Details. Partial atomization, I believe. Disruption of weak nuclear forces in genomic atoms. Can't regenerate if there's no healing factor."

"You are _sure_?"

"Yes, Adam. He's gone. He won't trouble you anymore.

Adam closed his eyes and released a shaky breath, one that felt like he had been holding for years. He was a powerful sorcerer but Logan had slipped through the crevices of his spells and this only reinforced the man's conviction that Adam was too dangerous to live. The spell held fast, fortunately, and the Wolverine could not convince the Avengers of what Adam had done. Still, he had made it his personal mission to find Adam and to put him down.

"And with that, the Age of Heroes ends," Jacob said, when the silence strained too much.

Adam took another deep breath and grounded himself. "There are still Avengers."

"But none of the old ones." Jacob's mouth twitched. "These ones are young and green."

"Still Avengers and still dangerous."

Jacob hummed in agreement. "I suppose. I wouldn't grow careless. But with Logan gone, I feel safer already."

Adam shifted uncomfortably in his seat. "They weren't all bad. They saved a lot of lives too."

"A lot of lives? Only if they weren't mutant!" A look of rage passed over Jacob's face, terrifying enough that Adam felt compelled to look away. When he spoke, his voice was quiet. "These Avengers only got mixed up with mutants when they were fighting the bad ones. The ones who dared think we deserved safety and dignity and had the foolishness to fight for those ideals. The ones who forgot that their place was beneath the boot of humanity. Where were these heroes when our innocents needed help? Mutants burned by the thousands. And even now, disappearing all over the place. Tortured. Killed. Children torn away from their families, vivisected in camps. Which Avenger bothered to lift a heroic finger?"

In the absence of an answer, Adam let the silence stretch as he let the words simmer between then. He had been a hero once too, so where was he then? Where was he now?

He turned his eyes back to Jacob and cleared his throat. "Must you go?"

"Afraid so, my friend." Jacob leaned back and visibly relaxed. "It has been a good seven years but I'm afraid I can't be of much help now."

Seven years. Yes, it had been seven years since Jacob had drifted into Adam's orbit, carried seemingly by fortuitous fate itself. The man was good for information, if a little unreachable at times, and asked few questions of his own. Adam was loath to admit it but he'd miss Jacob, who was a perfect stranger really but was almost a friend, though he suspected that this sudden burst of affection had less to do with the actual loss of propinquity than with the fact that this separation was rather symbolic of a more comprehensive loss. Jacob, after all, was the last person who knew Adam from his old life—well, in some flexible approximation of _knowing_ anyway—or that Adam even had another life.

"Can't you send someone else?"

"If this were any other task…. But this one I must do on my own."

"Where to, then?"

"Safer for you not to know."

"Tell me anyway."

Jacob seemed to consider him, measuring him up as if deciding whether he was worthy. He tilted his head and yawned. Adam felt a dormant power in Jacob stir. A small pulse, nothing overtly powerful, but a surgical strike to take out any eavesdropping device for a couple of blocks. "I leave for Genosha."

Adam startled at that and the word slipped out thoughtlessly. "Genosha?" The sound of it on his own lips felt awful and hallowed. It conjured images in his mind: a sanctuary profaned, their people herded and collared, mass graves. A place built for hope, turned to ash.

Jacob shrugged. "I have business there."

Adam narrowed his eyes and said in disbelief, "All of a sudden? All this time, why now? Why the sudden need to attend to this business? What changed in the world? Is it because the old heroes are gone?"

"Not really." Another shrug. "Like I've said… enemies to hunt, vengeances to exact. Nothing's changed in the world."

"Ha! So a change in _you_ , then," Adam declared with a triumphant jab of his forefinger.

"What, were you a psych major?"

Adam pushed his advantage.

"I knew it! So it's a woman…" he concluded with a grin and then with a teasing voice added, "or maybe a man?"

"So you're a telepath, are you?" Jacob turned back and regarded him with careful eyes. A small smiled played on his lips. "You are lucky I am fond of you, Adam Thorne, because I have little patience for telepaths. They know too much and understand too little."

"Well, I am not a telepath. Just trying to make conversation, " Adam said. "I won't keep you from your hunting and your exacting; you've got something for me?"

"You could go with me, you know," Jacob said sympathetically, ignoring the attempt to get on with business. "I was actually going to ask before you told me you wanted out. Heard you were very helpful with the Red Skull incident in Singapore. Saw the footages myself—don't worry, I had them erased as you'd asked. Point is I could use a man like you."

"No, thank you. No more running. Now that Wolverine is dead, I want a fresh start. And for real, this time. I'm tired, Jacob."

" _Tired,_ "Jacob scoffed _._ "Youth these days… You haven't lived enough to be cynical, boy."

Adam made a face but gave no reply. Jacob drummed his fingers on the table and watched thoughtfully. Outside, a heavy shadow fell on the island, as rain clouds gathered to blot out the sun. " _Adam Thorne_ …" he said, amused now. "Must say you're much younger than I imagined."

"Yeah, I get that a lot."

"What are you, twenty-five? Twenty-six? You could be my grandson."

"Around there."

"Ah, to be young again… So tell me, Adam, why's a young man like you running from the Avengers? What have you done? I never did ask."

Adam took a sip of coffee and held the man's gaze, silent and determinedly unmoved.

"Or maybe I should be asking what it is you _can_ do?"

"Jacob."

The man grinned, an ugly smile that stretched tight on his emaciated face. "Here, my friend," he said as he slid a small metal box across the table. He tapped twice on the lid and the lock released with a loud pop. "Passports. American, Swiss, Singaporean, and South African. For you and our friend. I hear you've taken a couple of strays—don't be so surprised; it's my business to know these things—but you have to make arrangements for the mutts yourselves. Bank accounts to your name and two others, Joshua Cain and Abel Smith; I thought I'd go with the theme, _Adam_. The book you'd asked for, I couldn't find, but I have an address of someone who might know something about it. And, as usual, a dossier on the households of the Upper West Side. There's something else I took the liberty of adding. I know you didn't ask but I think you'd find it interesting. I've enclosed the police report in there. Under the false bottom."

"Must be very important," Adam said absently as he rifled through the contents of the box. He took out the dossier first and searched for 'Kaplan'. No deaths, no medical diagnoses, no reports filed. Good. "I'll take a look at your mystery gift when I get around to it."

"I'd look at it sooner than later. Might change your mind about this," Jacob said with a lazy twist of his hand. "And that other business you asked me to look into… I've compiled everything I have. Don't think that I've forgotten. But before I leave you with it, I must ask one question. Surely I'm entitled to just one after all these years of friendship?"

Adam flipped through the rest of the dossier, feigning interest in the affairs of other Upper West Side families. Jacob must have taken this for approval and decided to start probing.

"You are an enigma, Mr. Thorne. Can't find anything on you and I don't know how you did that. There's _always_ a cyber footprint, no matter how thorough you are. Else, someone _always_ talks. And yet my hackers and spies have got nothing on you. Even in Singapore with the Red Skull and the girl… A lot of people saw you, Adam, and yet no one seems to remember what it is you do—or how you look, even. I'm not gonna ask who you are; I already have my suspicions about that. I just want to know how you did it."

"You're asking me to show you my power?"

Jacob shrugged.

Adam held Jacob's gaze and slowly lifted a clawed hand palm up between their faces. He expected the other man to protest or to recoil reflexively but Jacob only leaned closer with an expectant smile on his lips. Adam breathed out and sparks flew between his fingers, jumping from one digit to another in a hypnotic rhythm. The air took an ozone scent—sharp and pungent not unlike a swimming pool.

There were a few yelps in the café and a couple of patrons promptly stood up and left. But Adam didn't quite care. This was lawless Lowtown of Madripoor; the Registration Act was not enforced here. People knew to mind their own business and to look away.

"Amazing," Jacob whispered as his eyes glazed over in wonder. "You'd think in my line of work, I'd get used to these things. But seeing a mutant wield his power so easily? So bravely? That never gets old."

Then, to Adam's surprise, Jacob reached out with his hands and held Adam's. He held each finger delicately, inspecting and marveling. The sparks didn't seem to hurt him, dancing around his skin or through his flesh. Adam's fingers tingled and grew warm at the touch and he felt their powers meet and merge at each point of contact. He withdrew his hand when it got too hot.

"Complementary powers," Jacob explained with a pleased look. "So electrokinesis. Doesn't explain why no one remembers you, though."

Adam huffed and almost laughed. "Magic," he said, raising an eyebrow and crossing his arms.

Jacob groaned and rolled his eyes, like he had just heard the lame solution to a difficult riddle. "That's a cop-out but all right. Since it's you, I'll believe it." Jacob reached in his coat and handed Adam a thin manila folder. "Here's all I have."

Adam unwound the string and reached inside. Nearly a decade of running and globetrotting to chase the flimsiest leads only to give it all up. That was two years ago. He couldn't remember anymore why it had been so important even though it had been something of an obsession back then. Admittedly, running for one's life did tend to rearrange priorities, especially when you had an immortal psychopath on your tail. Still, an old sentiment stirred in him. Fear and hope pressed eagerly against his ribs as his hand retrieved a single sheet of paper with half a page printed and a small wallet-sized photograph tacked on to the corner with a paperclip.

"Did you find her?"

"I tried."

"That's a nice way of saying you failed."

Jacob shot him a glare.

"Sorry," Adam said quickly and Jacob accepted the apology with a nod.

"I'm afraid there isn't much that you don't already know."

"This is it? All those leads I sent you and this is the best you've got?"

Jacob's face was an impassive mask. "You mean all those rumors from _two years_ ago? Here's the thing… almost none of your _leads_ checked out. See if anyone so much as whispers about her, the whole web trembles; no one says her name without the entire world turning an ear to listen." Jacob paused, allowing the words to sink in before continuing. "But nothing. No one talks. She's gone, Thorne, and nobody wants her found. Or remembered. It is my professional opinion that the Witch is dead."

Adam's hands trembled slightly as he quickly scanned the words. Jacob was right; there was barely anything that he hadn't already known. Born in Wundagore… The Vision… Latveria… Doom… And last confirmed sighting in Utopia, when the Phoenix descended. Nothing on the other side of the paper. The photograph caught under his thumb, old and yellowed and tattered at the edges, and the woman inside peered up at him through sharp solemn eyes. "I guess it doesn't matter now," he said as he looked back to Jacob and slid the paper back in the folder. His lips curved into a soft smile. "I can't keep looking back if I want to start over, can I?"

Jacob studied him and made no response. Then, he looked at his watch and cleared his throat. "I wish you luck. I'm leaving and I have already made arrangements to keep you safe to the best of my abilities. But once you leave Madripoor, I won't be able protect you anymore. I hope you have sense enough to reach out should you need help," he said, as he pushed against the table and made to stand. "Always a pleasure to hear your voice, my friend, and good to finally see your face. I am sure we will meet again."

"Thank you, Jacob, for everything. I never could have—"

Jacob made a dismissive wave of his hand. "None of that, boy. I'm just an old man trying to do better. And one last thing, Mr. Thorne. There is one other thing you might want to know."

"What other thing?"

"There are whispers of a man. Appearing all over the world in the past seven years, wielding the same power as the Witch."

Adam felt the hairs on his arms stand. "Yeah?"

Jacob stared at him with a disapproving twist to his lips. "They're calling you the Scarlet Heir."

Adam was on his feet quickly so he was eye to eye with the man.

"Calm down, son. I'm not looking for trouble," Jacob said as he put a hand on Adam's shoulder. He looked around them, as other patrons turned to watch the unfolding spectacle. Two mutants about to fight. Always a fun watch. Only a few had the sense to leave. "Just want you to know that while I'm much quicker than SHIELD and their Avengers, it won't be long now before they hear of this. You best be careful and turn quickly that new leaf of yours; they don't take too kindly to those with more power than they."

Adam opened his mouth to make a response but Jacob shushed him with a frown. "No need for words now, my dear Adam. It will be a cold day in hell before harm finds the Witch's child through me."

An old sentiment gripped him then and Adam clutched desperately to the other man's sleeve. "So you think it's true? You think I— you think that I'm her—?"

Jacob smiled at him in a manner that was almost fond and gave his shoulder a firm squeeze. "Take care of yourself, son. And be safe; there aren't so many of us left."

And just like that, the yearning for the Witch was gone again, forgotten almost.

Adam watched as the old man left the café, giving him one last nod as he stepped through the door. Outside, the deluge broke, heralded only by a sudden clap of thunder.

* * *

There was the usual crowd on the bus ride back to Hightown. Commuters jostled and elbowed their way through the packed decks and rushed for empty seats at every stop. Adam was older now, more careful and more observant. He took note of the faces that walked past him and was careful to notice any who stared too long or were too quick to avert their eyes (there had almost been an incident in Nice, four years ago, that he was determined not to relive). He pushed his way to the back of the bus, where a seat, as if by magic, had kept itself unoccupied. The old Indian woman looked up to him in surprise when he sat beside her. He gave her a tight-lipped smile before stuffing his earphones into his ears and turning the volume up.

Outside, through rain-streaked windows, the sewer-drenched streets of Lowtown gave way to roadside houses and narrow alleyways, stretching far into the horizon where Madripoor hid her labyrinthine slums from the eyes of tourists and her wealthier denizens. Adam could just about make out the blur of towering structures in the distance, built in equal parts poverty and ingenuity by squatters who made houses out of galvanized steel roofs and plywood. The ride through Lowtown would be an hour long in the rush hour traffic so Adam lifted his eyes away from the pitiful sight and toward the sky, where stars had begun to emerge behind the dark curtain of rain and cloud.

There were few things that repelled him as keenly as Lowtown, which appalled him not for its poverty or even its lawless desolation but for what it represented. He remembered seeing it for the first time— _smelling_ it for the first time—four years ago. Just a month after Tony Stark's assassination and the incident with Mother. And now it made him think of what Jacob had said. Why were there no superheroes for those who needed the most saving? How could Captain America and Ironman and the rest of the shining Avengers call themselves _heroes_ when this place, this wretched hopeless place, existed on the very same world that they have sworn to protect and save?

The world was doomed, he was sure, doomed in a way that no superhero could save… And he thought briefly that it was broken in a way that only a supervillain could fix.

Adam withdrew himself from the mires of memory and, with a stiff twitch of his fingers, extended a portion of his magic, just a tendril, to clear a small area of the sky so he could see the stars. No use dwelling on things that he couldn't fix. Instead, he let his thoughts drift from the miserable planet, up over the sky, across the vacuum, and carried onwards by the eddies of space—to the wild flare of stars, where galaxies spun like iridescent dust and moons and planets hurtled past him at impossible speeds, where quasars pulsed intermittently through endless space like a beacon beckoning home. He thought too of old friends. Four years since Mother, since they last saw him. They hadn't missed him—well, they couldn't—and they would probably never see him again. Too much risk to the spell. Or maybe he didn't have to keep the spell up. Maybe he could finally break it. Maybe he could return to his old life. Become an Avenger again, even, and finally save the world in the way it most needed saving. Now that the last of the old Avengers had fallen…

The bus jerked violently as it drove over a pothole and Adam almost lost his grip on the metal box. He caught it with a yelp, just as it flew out of his hands, and he held it closer to his chest. One more day and he'd be starting a new life with Ruixian. What was he thinking about just now? He forgot now. He turned back to the sky and blinked, and the clouds parted further to a river of starlight.

It took an hour before the intertown made it to the walled garden city of Hightown and then another half-hour to Adam's stop. It wasn't raining on this side of town and it was a comfortably cool evening, so he decided he'd walk home instead of transiting to a city bus for the three-block distance. It was dark now, especially under the canopy of trees, and the streetlights were already turning on, dousing the tree-lined sidewalks with silvery light. Well-dressed men and women were pouring into cafés and restaurants, talking, laughing, and flirting. Adam removed his earphones and listened to the city.

There was the nightly cacophony of nocturnal mynah waking up, somewhere amongst the leaves, and taking flight to destinations unknown. The birds tended to wake in the early evening just at the beginning of rush hour traffic. Buses and cars moved more quickly on this road, though still slow, than on the intertown highway between Hightown and Lowtown. Adam watched the vehicles creep along the asphalt of Vineyard Road, paying particular attention to a gold-plated Ferrari crawling between two citicab taxis.

Two blocks down was the middle stretch of Vineyard Road, where rows of towering shopping malls rose on either side of the street like modern towers of babel scraping the soft belly of the clouds. The crowd was denser here and more fashionable. The sidewalk, which made clicking sounds under the crowd's well-heeled boots, was as wide as the road and of polished granite, lined with statues of animals and plants caught in various states of activity or repose. Dull lamps were installed deep into the pavement and fairy lights were woven amongst the foliage, giving the impression of constellations in the canopy. This was Adam's least favorite part of the Road. Often it was too crowded and he felt nauseated by the assault colognes and perfumes that mingled abominably into a smoggy mix. And, most unforgivably, it reminded him too much of Manhattan. He held the box close to his chest and hurried in a brisk walk, taking as little breath as possible.

At the end of Vineyard Road, he took a right turn to Vineyard Close, a long narrow strip of a street between two hotels and at the far end, crossed into Melaka subdivision. And in there, he finally felt at home. Just inside the gated entrance, the small road was lined on either side by market stalls, which were now in the midst of closing down. The crowd here was less ostentatious though perhaps more distinct. As he walked down the street, Adam smelled oils and curries and spices and saw under the stalls' awnings unfamiliar meats hanging by hooks and piles of colored powders of uses that could be culinary, medical, or even mystical. Knots of people walked past him, chattering in tongues he could now easily recognize as Thai or Vietnamese or Filipino or Malay. And when he finally turned into Melaka Lane, there was already a line in front of the Filipino food truck famous for its balut, which lovers enjoyed in the small adjacent park.

Adam fished his phone out of his pocket to check the time—6:38pm—and his heart sank when he saw the notifications.

- _Dinner at Cha Cha Cha?_

 _-Halloooo, where are you?_

 _-Have you met your creepy sugar daddy, yet?_

 _-Are you alive? Pls don't make me come down to Lowtown if you're not dead. :(_

Six missed calls. Crap. Adam typed out a message and hit send.

 _-Sugar daddy? Really? Gross. On my way back. Will just see you at home. Feel like mee goreng, anyway._

Just beside the park was Le Jardin, a condominium complex that had been Adam's home for the past three years. It was a squat building on the lower end of Hightown real estate but it was within Adam's budget and close to Ruixian's apartment. It overlooked the park too, which made a pretty view in the early mornings, and in the spring he could smell the flowers and watch them ride the updraft outside his window.

 _My last night_ , Adam thought to himself.

He took a right turn into Melaka Rise, the rectangular park on the southeastern side. Here was a stretch of family-owned shops that he frequented regularly. Most of them had already closed for the day but the bakery at the corner was still open so he went in, bought himself a fish floss bun, and left Mr. Khoo a handsome tip in his jar. The man shook his hand heartily and flashed him his toothy grin and Adam couldn't help but blush a little at the old man's affection. He explained that he would be returning to Canada tomorrow and that he was taking a stroll through the streets to see the neighborhood one last time. Adam left the shop with a box of cake in his hands, five baguettes under his arm and the business card of Mr. Khoo's sister-in-law, who lived in Toronto, in his breast pocket.

The other shops were closed but he took time to peer through the dark windows and looked at the items on sale. There was a doll shop, which was as creepy in the dark as one would expect, an antique store, another café, and a second-hand bookshop, which sat on the end of the street. People walked past him, talking loudly of which trendy restaurant to try or which film to catch, and he ignored them as they ignored him. Some faces were familiar and for those he stopped for a quick exchange of pleasantries and pastry.

When he reached the bookshop, he stopped and turned to look back down the street all the way to where Mr. Khoo had ensconced himself on the steel bench in front of his bakery. He tried to conjure a sense of sentimentality, now that he was leaving. This neighborhood had been home for him for three years and he had made friends here. He ought to be sad or wistful or at least anxious for nostalgia but every attempt at memory just filled him with dread. He had been in hiding—a fact, which he had never allowed himself forget for one second—and that seemed to taint every memory of the place. For all the safety it had provided all these years, the cozy neighborhood of Melaka would always be both sanctuary and exile.

Adam might have expected some melancholic ambivalence but the emotions in his chest were clear and unambiguous. The Wolverine was dead and he was finally free; now, he could truly begin anew. If there were to be any tears shed, they'd be tears of relief. Adam closed his eyes and took a deep breath, capturing for what might be the last time the heady scent of dama de noche that had just began to bloom, as it only did, in the night time. He opened his eyes and with renewed purpose, walked briskly down the street and turned into Le Jardin.

The courtyard was tiny and felt suffocating in the warm humid night. In between overgrown trellises of the courtyard were even tinier gazebos that would accommodate a couple and maybe an infant interloper. Adam walked briskly across the cobbled path, made irritable by the sweat that had started to trickle down his back, and climbed the brick steps.

A voice croaked in the dark just as he paused the heavy wooden doors. He was maneuvering his way to the access card in his pants through three pieces of baguette, half a cake, and a metal box of clandestine documents when the intruding sound called out to him.

"Oh, hello there, Mr. Thorne."

An elderly couple emerged from one of the gazebos and Adam turned to return a polite wave. The old man guided his wife up the steps and, without offering or asking, took the boxes off Adam's hands.

"Thanks. Nice warm evening we have, no?"

"Too hot, I think!" the man's wife answered for him.

"So you're leaving tomorrow?"

"Afraid so, Dolly. I'll miss this place. Been here for three years, after all."

The old woman scoffed and patted his arm. "This old place? Not much to offer. You're better off anywhere else."

"Then why do you stay here, doc?" Adam asked with a grin.

Dolly turned to her husband and pulled at his earlobe. "This old coot's Madripoor through and through. Never even been off the island, could you believe it? Not even Singapore or Malaysia!"

Adam couldn't help but laugh as the old man grumbled something about metal coffins. "Anything for love, eh, Sutan?" Adam winked.

"Love... fear... who could tell these days?" Sutan said. "But that reminds me... your lady friend is upstairs."

With a lurch, Adam shoved his hand into his pocket and pulled out his card. He tapped it against the reader and the heavy wooden doors unlocked with a click, swinging inside to reveal a narrow corridor lined with apartment doors and the elevator doors at the end.

"Oh. Well, then I have to go. It was so nice to see you both," he said quickly and then after a bit of thought, added, "I'll write, when I can."

"You take care now, young man." Sutan handed him back the boxes and squeezed his shoulder. "Would you still be here for breakfast? I'm making waffles."

"My flight's at six so probably not. You take care too, both of you."

"Goodbye, darling." Dolly kissed him on the cheek and with that, he was off into the building.

As the elevator descended, he turned back to his neighbors one more time and waved, baguette and everything. He was impatient to get back now and regretted that he hadn't taken the city bus from Vineyard to Melaka and that he had wanted to be all sentimental and had taken a detour up Melaka Rise. He tapped his foot excitedly on the elevator floor all the way up and nearly broke his key in the keyhole.

* * *

For Hightown Madripoor, his apartment was rather Spartan. He had water, gas, and electricity, sure, but aside from the kitchen, every room in the house was criminally under furnished: the living room had a ratty old couch and a tv—the latter being a gift from Ruixian—, the small dining room was just a small plastic table and a pair of folding chairs, and the bedroom was composed only of chair, desk, and a single bed that he had never used. Amidst the dust and litter were islands of half-opened boxes in various states of unpacking and low wooden tables where he kept some of his tools for the craft. On each wall in each room hung a tall frame, beside each of which rested a large knapsack packed with rations, clothes, money, and some herbs. Of course, he had made sure to bury a protective charm bag beneath the floorboards.

"Are you sure you don't want any?" Adam called out from the kitchen as he filled a small pot with water. He could hear the television from the living room, where Ruixian had installed herself, and the scuffle of dog feet coming from his room. When he didn't hear an answer, Adam stepped through the doorframe and asked again. "Hey, I asked if you wanted instant noodles."

"No thanks, I'm good," the girl answered, without turning away from the Taiwanese drama she was watching. Sitting down, she was barely taller the couch's backrest.

"All right, suit yourself. Not my fault if you get hungry at the airport. Did you pack anything?" Adam said, as he moved back to the kitchen.

"Just a small carry-on suitcase."

"All right then." Adam would have preferred a backpack but he didn't nag. "And you've made arrangements for the boys?"

"Got them each a crate. I doubt they'd like it and I don't either but since you're determined to do this old school, there's no other way around it."

Adam hummed in agreement. "Everything okay?" he asked. "You're not nervous, are you?"

There was a small pause. When Ruixian replied, her voice sounded forced. "A little but mostly just tired."

"Okay. Tell me if you need anything." Adam took out two packets of mee goreng and dropped the noodles in the boiling water.

"Actually, I think I'll have a plate after all," Ruixian said as she stepped in the kitchen.

"Yeah? Well tough," Adam said while he grabbed the scissors. "It's too late now. I've already—"

As Adam cut across the foil, the scissors slipped and sliced the tip of his forefinger. He stared at the drop of blood welling out from the cut.

Ah, _fuck_.

His body moved quickly and unerringly. Adam grabbed a kitchen knife from the magnetic strip above the stove and whirled on the spot. Without missing a beat, he threw the knife to the direction of the kitchen door, where Ruixian was standing. She caught the blade between her palms, just a hair's width from her face, but still a little too late. The sharp tip had penetrated the mask, which made a soft crackling sound as it fell to the floor.

All the while, Adam had been quick on his feet. As soon as he had hurled the knife, he had leapt and slid across the kitchen island. He landed quietly on the other side and drove the heel of his right hand into the woman's solar plexus, making sure to bear down with all his weight. The woman looked up at him wide-eyed with surprise. She staggered backwards into the dining room and fell hard on the floor. Adam was immediately on his knees, straddling her chest and pinning down her arms under his shins.

"Where is my friend?" He demanded as he wrapped one hand around her throat and lifted the other in a fist. "Who do you work for?"

There was a loud crash to his left just as someone kicked the front door open. Another woman stepped in the room and drew a gun to his head. He wasn't fast enough this time.

The bullet melted against his skin but the toxin buried itself into his forehead. Homeostatic spells kicked in immediately but he knew at once that they wouldn't hold very long. With a yelp, he threw his arms over his face, as if shielding it from another bullet, and half the floor exploded in a burst of splinters. The woman under him shuddered and went still and the other one leapt back out into the hallway as fragments of wood flew upwards with fatal velocity.

Adam thrust a clawed hand to the front door and with a loud groan, the walls crumbled and obscured the door. With a wave of his other hand, the door to his room opened with an explosion of sparks and he called out, "Oscar! Dante! To me!" The mongrels came out running and threw themselves against Adam's body. He carried them under his arms and then limped to the nearest portrait frame.

 _Fuck_ , he thought uselessly. Paralysis was already spreading to his limbs. With considerable effort, he bit his lower lip until blood was gushing down his chin. Adam sucked the blood into his mouth and swirled it in his saliva, conjuring in his mind a clear image of his destination. He spat on the area inside the frame and, with relief, saw the space turn into a shimmering ripple.

He had just about enough time to grab one of his survival bags before his legs gave in and he tumbled into the frame. His body plunged through something viscous and then he was falling out of another frame a dozen blocks away—this one nailed to the ceiling—and into another frame on the floor. Again, in another place—this one in a dusty attic—he emerged, only to be carried forward by inertia into another shimmering frame. Frame to frame, he tumbled and fell, alternating between air and the gel-like substance of whatever mystical space that existed between portals. Each frame fell into pieces as soon as he passed through it, burning off his trail. Singapore. Kuala Lumpur. Tokyo. New Delhi. San Francisco. Grenoble… The dogs were quiet and stiff, as if their muscles had ceased working as well, and if they found the in-between space queer, they didn't let it show. They must have gone through a dozen jumps, man locked in toxic paralysis and dogs in unwavering faith to their master, before they finally shot out into a room with no other frame.

There, Adam's arms finally lost strength and the dogs scampered away, their sharp nails making clicking sounds on the floor. Behind him, he heard the sound of the wooden frame breaking into pieces.

Adam crumpled painfully on the ground and hit his head against the cement. Only then, in the safety of his cabin, did the pain make itself known. His head throbbed and he was bleeding and he felt the strain of magic in his bones. Skin, muscle, bone, marrow, _soul_. Everything was on fire and the pain was just sharp enough to push him over the edge of consciousness. But he couldn't fall asleep. He couldn't. He couldn't afford to.

 _The dogs. The dogs will know to help,_ he thought deliriously through the red fog of his misery.

"Oscar," he called out weakly and then more forcefully, "Dante!"

The clicking stopped and the dogs turned their heads to him. Adam smiled to himself and said, "Fetch me the—"

 _Open sky. Warm. Cloudless. Sunless. Blue. And bright. An unmarred dome of light._

 _A cool breeze blew and stalks of barley bent and swayed around his knees. The fields rippled into the far horizon like a sea of gold, waves rolling across the expanse and then disappearing behind the edge of the world._

 _Where was he? What was he doing here?_

 _He looked up, straining his neck as he twisted this way and that to gaze at the infinite sky. He shifted his eyes to the horizon, turned slowly on the spot and saw that the golden sea stretched to all directions. An endless field under an endless sky and he in the center of the world._

 _And then, in the space between heartbeats, the world shifted. A fierce gust blew, hard like a storm, that flattened the barley stalks to the ground. He squinted and threw his arms to his face. Quick as smoke, black clouds billowed up from the horizon and dimmed the sky, chilling the world._

 _There was a sound behind him. A rustle that carried despite the harsh wind. A pair of feet landing softly._

 _Then a voice spoke an impossible word. It was said gently. Like it were a fragile thing that, at the moment of being spoken, would break. A word said like a prayer._

 _"Billy," the voice said once again, warm and achingly familiar._

 _Billy turned and looked into the face of memory._


	2. Maria

**Maria**

 _Billy stared into the man's eyes—such blue eyes that were so penetrating in their clarity. His wild hair, shimmering in a tangled mess like golden flame, flickered carelessly in the wind. He had the surreal look of ideal masculine beauty about him, which felt almost contrived in that he seemed the idea of a man more than an actual man, the broadness and shape of an arbitrary demigod fit incongruously in a white t-shirt and tattered jeans. He lifted an arm and his fingers reached out for Billy._

 _Billy gaped at the stranger, rapt in morbid fascination and an unshakeable certainty that he was teetering on the edge of a cliff. And beyond that precipitous drop was a great abyss, within which lay the secret pieces of something vital and lost. There was a tightness in his chest and, stranger still, a deep yearning to touch the other man. He stood transfixed, knowing that if he looked away, he would crumble against the weight of that_ _un_ _remembered loss._

 _Then, the alien finger touched his cheek and his thoughts shifted, crystallizing into the overriding prudence of self-preservation. With a sudden clarity of purpose, Billy's face contorted into a vicious snarl; he shouted_ _against the entity, "Out!" and the wind blew so hard it was deafening. Billy spoke again and his words rang high and clear above the storm. "Out, invader, out! You are not welcome in my mind!"_

 _The whirlwind raged across the earth and stalks of barley tore away from the ground, filling the sky with their golden flight. The man stood still, fixed to his place like a statue, and watched Billy with unmoved intensity._

 _Again, Billy shouted, "Out!"_

 _The ground shook once… twice… and then the earth was torn asunder. The ground exploded into boulders and chunks of soil, which hurtled upwards to the black void that had been the sky. The man's hand fell away from Billy's face, tracing a gentle line across his cheek._

 _"Billy, stop. Please," he pleaded and_ _, against all instinct and reason, Billy's will wavered and the earth grew calm._

 _He looked around him, at the fertile earth now turned to rocky desolation. Above him, inky clouds were in repose as if frozen in an impressionist sky._

 _"You're here… You're actually here," the man said._ _"What the fuck, Billy?"_

 _Billy paused and turned back to the man. "_ _What did you call me?"_

 _"What?" The man scowled._ _"Billy?"_

 _Billy_ _frowned and replied, carefully and emphatically, "Just who are you?"_

 _The stranger took a step back. A faltering arm jerked again towards Billy and then fell uselessly to his side. Like he wanted to touch, but could not._

 _Billy seized that hesitation and jabbed a finger into the intruder's chest. He squinted and looked up at the man, glaring mightily into a pair of blue eyes. "Who are you?"_

 _"I—" The man recoiled as if Billy had struck him._

 _"How are you even here? No telepath or dreamwalker can breach my spells," he said confidently, puffing out his chest as he found footing in the man's confusion._

 _"I—I'm not a telepath," the man said slowly. "Or a dreamwalker."_

 _"Then how are you here?" Billy withdrew his hand and clenched his fists at his sides. "The only person who can get inside my mind is me. I've made sure of that"_

 _The man did not respond and there was silence for a while. Seconds passed, maybe minutes, and all he did was stare. He seemed to have collected himself and had begun to watch Billy with soft but calculating eyes. There was a heaviness to that gaze, a sense of easy intimacy that felt presumptuous and unbearable. Billy felt his face grow hot and he averted his eyes to the ground._

 _"I think… I think I know why," the man said. "I understand now."_

Hair like barley and eyes like sky, _Billy thought absently._ And what kind of face is that? _Billy reflected on his own appearance—all nose and elbows and knees—and felt inadequate before the demigod._ Wait, what?

 _He frowned at the fugitive thought and chided himself._

 _"Why are you here?" he asked self-consciously without looking. The fire had gone out of his voice._

 _"I think I'm supposed to be here."_

 _"How? The spells are holding." He checked as he spoke, and felt the familiar thrumming of protective magic under his skin. "Only I can be here."_

 _The man lifted his hand again, tentatively at first, and then more bravely, and finally he held it against Billy's cheek. He cradled Billy's face in his palm and traced slow circles on his cheekbone with a rough thumb. And to Billy's surprise, he found himself closing his eyes and leaning into the touch._

 _"Silly Billy,"_ _the_ _man said softly. "I am made of you."_

* * *

"—sticks by the… fire… place…" Adam trailed off.

He was on the floor again, lying on his side and his hand still reaching for the far wall, as if no time had passed at all. The vast openness of sky had contracted into the cold isolation of his stone cabin. He looked around carefully and found the window, through which sunlight streamed into the room. A moth-eaten curtain hung limp on a wooden rod above the mildewed glass.

It had been night when he had left Madripoor so unless he had botched the portal and incurred a time cost—no, not possible; the portals were his escape plan and for that reason he had been very careful setting them up. That meant that some few hours had passed. And, as if to affirm his deductions, there was movement against his sides, a rhythmic contraction and expansion of two warm masses pressing gently against his torso.

"Fuck," he said, out loud. The dogs stirred sleepily against him and Dante—the brown one—whined and licked his cheek. "Fuck. Fuck. Fuck."

 _Was it a dream, then?_ The thought chilled him. Let it be the probing of an adept telepath or the fatal intrusion of a mental parasite. Let the telepath have his secrets—his _name_ , which even now slips from his mind like sand between his fingers. Let the parasite lay its eggs and reduce his mind to the ruins of insanity. The last time he had slept, he dreamed of Rebecca Kaplan and woke up to Mother's gleaming knife of a smile leaning over him.

Adam pressed his eyes closed and screamed in frustration, his voice making impotent echoes in the enclosure of his safe house. Dante and Oscar leapt away from him and then, seeing him in tears, snuggled fiercely into his chest. He hugged them close and buried his face in their unwashed fur. Whose it was specifically, he couldn't tell, but he let himself cry unabated and they let him crush their bodies against his chest. He couldn't couldn't breathe. He had been careful, _so careful_ , with all his spells and his potions and all the fucking incantations in half a dozen dead languages. And all it took was one surprise attack from… from…— _fuck_ , who even were those people?—and down he went. Who knew what meta-dimensional abomination he had loosed in the universe this time? One powerful enough to uncover a name that even he could no longer reach.

"I'm sorry," he mumbled. "I'm so sorry. Just one minute. I just—one minute, all right? Let me have one fucking minute."

Adam clung to them and they didn't move or complain. He didn't think about how well rested he felt or how for the first time in years, he didn't feel even remotely sleepy. The only thing that hurt was the cut lip and the mild throbbing in his head—but that was a permanent thing now, ever since he had stopped sleeping. His muscles weren't cramped and his bones didn't ache with the tremors that always succeeded the sudden use of magic.

When his minute was up, he drew himself up on shaky arms and gave Dante and Oscar a scratch behind the ear. He made himself kneel on the stone floor. If anything had happened, it would find him soon enough and he would take care of it, as he always had. He was older now. Wiser. He'd manage.

He took a deep breath. "Okay," he said, as he straightened his back and slapped his cheeks twice with cupped hands. He looked at the dogs and tried a smile that he didn't feel just yet.

"Okay," he said again.

He lifted his eyes and stared at the open ceiling, where, carved haphazardly with slashing lines on the wooden beam, two words read: Mount Arayat.

* * *

Adam sank to his knees as he waved his hands amidst the rain of chicken feathers. Around him, the candles on the five points of the pentagram came to life and thin streams of fire flared high, bathing the room in a sudden burst of light. The flames blazed like wavering ribbons and licked the stone ceiling of the cabin.

"Okay, boys, I've got a good feeling about this," he said to the two dogs in the corner. He glanced at them briefly and found them cowering with their faces against wall.

As the fires dwindled, Adam grabbed the rabbit from its cage and quickly slit its throat over the iron chalice. The blood pooled and filled the cup to the rim and then, just as it was about to overflow, it stilled. Adam held his breath and watched. Seconds passed and then minutes.

"Come on…"

Dead center, a single perfectly spherical drop rose slowly from the liquid and hovered an inch or so above the mirror-like surface. It floated for about a second and then fell, under the natural compulsion of gravity, back into the cup. It made one wave on the surface, rippling radially to the chalice's lips without spilling and then coming back to the center. The drop reemerged from the center and fell back, making another silky wave that radiated to the rim and back.

Shadows formed beneath the surface and swirled lazily. They merged, separated, and merged again, forming solid shapes that were yet too hazy and too distorted to give meaning.

"Here we go. Here we go," Adam said to himself as he lowered his face to the chalice. He watched the surface expectantly and sweat trickled down his temples as the wave grew more violent with each cycle. "Come on. Hold it."

He could just about see the spirit's face, glaring at him from under the surface, when the candle flames faltered, sputtered, and then finally died.

"No, no, no, no, no!" Adam gazed about the pentagram frantically, eyes still unfocused and dilated.

The drop of blood rose one last time, quivering in the air before falling sloppily back into its puddle. The wave that formed was too large, too unstable. It hit the rim of the chalice and spilled over the sides, coating the unburnished silver. The image disintegrated and the spell broke.

Adam shuddered at the backlash of frustrated magic, that jarring sting in his skeleton that came with unspent power snapping back into its source. Like an overstretched rubber band suddenly released. Adam punched the ground, too exhausted to put any force behind it, and looked about him in exasperation. Carcasses of chickens and rabbits were scattered outside the perimeter of his pentagram and the stale air reeked of death and herbs.

He rolled over on his back and stared at the wooden beams beneath the thatch roof, panting. He tried to whistle and then, failing that, called out between ragged breaths. "Dante, Oscar."

The dogs came to him, hesitantly at first, and there was no sound in the house but for the sharp pitter-patter of their nails and Adam's own ragged breathing. Dante and Oscar plopped down to his left side and rested their heads on his chest. Oscar, the white-spotted black one, looked up to him with doleful brown eyes. Adam ran a hand over his head and whispered, "I miss her too, buddy."

* * *

Those days passed slowly for Adam. He ate only in the mornings—two eggs and half a chicken, always—but the dogs he made sure to feed thrice a day. What small charms he could risk lured rabbits and chickens—though fewer and fewer each day—and the cleverly engineered network of gutters supplied rainwater directly into the house. The cabin itself was an abandoned stone cottage in a small clearing tucked between the base of a cliff and an encroaching forest. It was tiny and humid and had a moldy smell, but it was remote and safe from human eyes. Not that it was remoteness or inaccessibility that repelled human attention. Mount Arayat was shrouded in mists of superstition, which was its armor against human curiosity, but to those who wielded the forces of magic, it was a font of power. The mountain was suffused with the cosmic web of ley lines, making it a nexus of mystical energy that an adept mage could harness. But such aggregation of magic also created a lot of mystic noise, which made the mountain impenetrable to the Sight of most mystics.

Adam had no illusions about the enormity of his task. Ruixian had been taken by what looked like an organized group, which probably meant they had access to other mystics, who would no doubt confound his attempts to find her. And even without the interference of another mystic, it had never been an easy feat to find someone with magic—well with _formal_ magic, anyway. But he hadn't thought it would take a week. He had started off simple with locating spells, thinking that after finding Ruixian he could quickly carve a path and carry her off. When the basic spells didn't work, he tried variations: scrying, projection, even castling. And when he had exhausted those on the sixth day, he finally resorted to summoning. He called on demons, spirits, fairies, even minor deities, but not a single one came to his aid.

Between breakfasts, he spent his time setting up circles and gathering the necessary paraphernalia for his spells. The safe house was well-stocked with the commodities of his craft and so there was little reason to leave the cabin except to relieve himself and to bathe in a nearby brook.

"We won't stay here for long," he told the dogs over breakfast on the ninth day. He could spare very little of the herbs so the chicken was rather bland but he had been half-starved for over a week now so he dug voraciously into his wooden bowl anyway. "I'll get her back. I promise."

The table was littered with bundles of herbs, bowls of crushed flowers, and the bled-out carcass of a hen that he had been feathering, so he had his breakfast on the floor with Dante and Oscar. They had lost some weight despite Adam's diligence in feeding them. He studied his own bony arms, wondering how he looked like now after days of relentless spell-casting with meager food and water. He imagined himself gaunter now, gray and grimy and tattered-looking, with a patchy scruff that infuriated him. A stray image drifted through his thoughts: of a blond man with warm hands waiting under an open sky. Adam sighed at the ill-timed thought, a half-laugh, and shook his head, remembering that there were some who believed that magic was a threshold to insanity.

"Like mother like child, I suppose," he muttered humorlessly.

The dogs observed him with their muzzles buried in their bowls. They were mongrels and not even particularly handsome-looking ones but he and Ruixan loved them dearly. When Oscar was finished, he scampered to Adam's side, rolled over and lay on his back, belly-up.

"We'll get her back, I promise," Adam said again as he scratched the dog's belly. "No matter what."

* * *

He had known for the past two days now what had to be done—what cost must be paid so his pleas could reach the court of the Lady Maria Sinukuan. And what a dear price it must be too.

He had spent the day making preparations. He had redrawn the sigils and the pentagram with his own blood mixed into the salt, had washed the chalice and had scrubbed it—again with his own blood—until it shone under the light, and had even gathered rare varuna and fatal belladonna—all plucked in silvery moonlight, of course!—because he didn't want to risk offense with preserved stock.

When he was ready, he sat himself cross-legged in the center of the circle and placed the chalice before him. To his left, piled in a copper plate, were stalks and blooms of varuna while an identical plate to his right held the deadly berries of belladonna. As he waited, he watched the shadows on the flat wall sway hypnotically like puppets on a screen. Finally, the sun aligned through the window and a ray of light fell on the chalice.

He snapped his fingers—pure magic this time; no shortcuts, just in case—and a small spark ignited in each of the plates. Their contents caught fire at once and twin streams of smoke drifted thinly in the air until the room was swimming with their heady scents. Adam took a deep breath and felt the awakening of magic in his bones. His chest drifted forward and his head fell back instinctively, as his body yearned to lift off the ground. Another breath and his eyes closed; his lips parted in ecstasy.

The magic built inside him, rising and roiling and boiling, held back in an increasingly unstable equilibrium by sheer power of will. He released a soft sigh and opened his eyes, which burned with the deep electric blue of his magic. He felt a trickle of chaos magic infecting the mix but he stoppered the leak easily enough.

At last, he turned to Dante and Oscar, who rested their heads on his thighs and watched him with patient and faithful eyes. He thought briefly of what he was about to do, hesitated, and then steeled himself. All sacrifice had been found wanting because they were no true sacrifice. But this… this was a precious loss that would cut him deep; the court of spirits _must_ pay heed.

He couldn't have made them sleep or the price would have only been half-paid. He ran his hands over their heads and they flicked their tails against the floor. There was a high keening noise outside, as if the mountain itself was wailing.

Adam reached for the two knives just beyond the chalice and raised them with both hands above his head. Oscar and Dante stiffened against him when they saw the blades' glint above them. He could see it in their eyes: pools of brown darting quickly to the executioner's blades and then to the hands that would betray them—hands that before had fed, caressed, and protected. Pitifully, they whined and struggled but it was too late—the ribbons of belladonna and varuna smoke held them down like thick heavy ropes so they couldn't move an inch. Adam stifled a sob. God, he couldn't even close his eyes. He had to make himself _watch._

The magic swirled and exploded from his core. It coursed through his arms, his hands, his fingertips, and finally gathered in the blades. His hands shook at the immense concentration of magic in his palms; it was like holding lightning.

And finally, the time came.

 _For Ruixian,_ he steeled himself.

He flipped the knives so the points were pointing down. He didn't hesitate for a moment. With a cry he drove the knives down, aimed unfailingly at Dante and Oscar's throats.

* * *

When she came, there was no sound. No crack of thunder nor whisper of rustling cloth. Not even a sudden displacement of air. It was as if she didn't occupy space at all. Adam wouldn't have known she was there if he hadn't felt her hands around his wrists. Her skin was rough against his flesh and her grip was strong, strong enough that she easily held back his arms so that the knives did not break skin.

But they felt it. Dante and Oscar _knew._ It was in their eyes. In the heartbroken way they stared at him still straining to bury the knives in their throats, in the hurry with which they leapt away from him when the smoke dissipated, and in the way they slunk across the room.

"You came," he said softly to the Lady of the Mountain.

"The Lord Supreme had called and so I came," came the reply in a voice younger than he remembered.

Half-dazed, he didn't quite hear her.

"I've been calling for days."

"You didn't pay the price, spoiled child," she said sharply.

"I didn't this time either," he said hollowly.

"You did, my Lord Supreme."

She held his chin gently and led his eyes to the far corner of the cabin, where Dante and Oscar had pressed themselves against the wall, as far away from Adam as possible. They made a soft whimpering sound when his eyes met theirs.

"Behold, little mage: the price."

She was right. There was no jarring in his bones, no burn in his soul, no strain inside his brain—all symptoms of failed magic; the spell was cast and the price was paid.

"How cruel," Adam muttered. He turned to the girl and took her in for the first time. She was young, with thick curling hair falling to her ankles, and dressed in a white flowing dress that spilled over her feet. Her brown lugubrious face was sharper than he remembered and her eyes had lost the softness to them.

"You are not Mariang Sinukuan," he declared simply.

"My lord, my mother is dead," she said mournfully. "I am Maria Heredera."

Adam frowned. "Dead?" he asked dumbly. "How?"

"Killed!" she moaned pitifully. "Oh, my lord, my dear mother is killed!"

"By whom?" he asked incredulously. "Who could kill the great spirit of ancient Arayat?"

Her face contorted hideously, such that her beauty betrayed its odious inhumanity. "You did, you fool!" Maria Heredera screamed viciously, as she brought her face close to his. "You killed my mother, you selfish cowardly child!"

She stood fluidly with one graceful sweep of her robe and glided over to Dante and Oscar.

* * *

"I don't understand how I could have possibly killed your mother," he told her the next day. "I haven't seen her in two years."

They were out in the forest, in a shallow rocky stream that rose halfway up their knees. On either side of the stream were low banks of mud and fitted stones that might have constituted part of an irrigating system a long time ago. Maria Heredera was walking a few paces upstream, making no waves as she drifted through the waters. Dante and Oscar padded along beside her, occasionally nuzzling against her leg and never sparing a glance for him.

They worked their way up a meander where the riverbed gradually deepened until the water was up to their armpits. Maria Heredera stopped when the water touched her chin. The dogs, who had moved to follow along the banks, barked at her when she stayed immobile for minutes.

She turned to face Adam and said in a tragic voice, "I cannot go further, my Lord Supreme."

"Then let's go back to the cabin," he suggested helpfully, adamantly ignoring the epithet and staunchly determined to remain innocent of its implications. "We can fix a spell to find my friend and then I'll release you and you can go wherever you want to. Doesn't that sound good?"

She seemed to consider that, and then sank languidly into the still waters without disturbing its smooth surface. She came up some seconds later beside Adam and said, "We need the full moon to find her and then the lambanas' help to retrieve her." Without waiting for an answer, she walked to the banks where the dogs were waiting. She climbed up the exposed tree roots easily, her dress already dry.

"Full moon? Are you serious?" he echoed impatiently. He closed his eyes in irritation and then added through gritted teeth, " _That was three nights ago_."

Maria looked over her shoulder and stared him in the eye. And then, she laughed; it sounded so child-like and innocent that it made his hackles rise. When she spoke, her voice was high and clear and dripping with mirthful malice, "You had known the price two days before that, vile child. And now your friend suffers for your softness!" She laughed again.

"I need her _now_ ," Adam said with an edge to his voice.

"I am bound to your petulant will, little mage," she said gleefully. "Yet I cannot perform impossibilities. Even magic has rules." She paused and then added with narrowed eyes, "Well, _almost all_ kinds of magic, anyway."

"She'll die!"

Maria shrugged. "I am not powerful enough to find and retrieve her without the moon. I cannot bend the fact. Otherwise, dismiss me and save her with your own power."

"I can't. You're my last resort."

"Then learn patience, little mage."

Adam clenched his hands into fists and sparks of electricity leapt across the water's surface.

Dante and Oscar leapt in front of Maria, placing themselves between spirit and mage. They bared their teeth at their old master and growled, hackles raised and tails pressed flat to the ground.

Adam watched them and felt acutely the price that he had paid for the wretched spirit.

"My Lord Supreme…" Maria said in awe, reverting to innocent deference.

Adam took a deep breath and sighed. "I didn't mean to; I lost control."

"That was no magic."Maria cupped her hands and conjured some brown substance on her palms. She offered it to Dante and Oscar, who wouldn't tear their eyes away from Adam until she made shushing sounds of comfort. She looked at Adam thoughtfully and said, "How can this be? How can you be impure?"

"Are you spirit or demon? I'm tired of your spitefulness."

Maria Heredera bowed her head low, which made an awkward sight with the dogs licking her hands. "Forgive me, my Lord Supreme, but I am a spirit bound to obey her nature. Your condition is not simply rare but outright impossible."

"What condition?"

Maria lifted her eyes and looked at him as if he were stupid. "Why, your deviation, of course!"

"My devi—you mean my being a mutant? Is there bigotry among spirits?" he asked with a sneer.

"The human language is flawed," she said distastefully, throwing Adam a vile look as if she considered that his personal fault. "There are no words to describe your kind that could not be misconstrued as an insult. Everything is a slur!"

Adam waded to the bank and began to climb up the roots, imitating the same path he had seen Maria take. "Try harder than 'impure'. Or 'deviant' for that matter? Why not just say 'different'?"

"What is wrong with deviance? Or impurity for that matter?" Maria replied, offering her hand to Adam to help him up.

Adam sighed, having little patience for a spirit's philosophying. "Just tell me the point to all this. Why is my _deviation_ impossible?"

They turned together and began their walk around the cliff. The path was worn and well-used, serried on one side by middling trees and on the other, a rocky drop to the river. Adam took her left while Oscar and Dante fell back to her right, away from him. They watched him carefully, as if to protect the spirit if he should hurt her.

"What do you know of magic, child?" she asked as she stepped over a thick exposed root.

"More than you assume. Not to brag but I _am_ pretty good; I can handle most spells, if not all."

"But do you know where magic comes from? Why only some can wield it?"

Adam shrugged. "No. But what does this have to do with my being a mutant? Are you saying mutants should not be able to use magic?"

Maria nodded. "Only the purest lines can use magic."

"Really?"

"I cannot lie."

"There are others like me, you know? Mystics who are also mutants."

"That is impossible."

"You are wrong."

"I cannot lie."

"You might _think_ that what you're saying is true but empirical evidence shows you're demonstrably wrong."

"Illiterate sorcerer, are you lecturing a being made of magic about magic?"

Adam let the insult pass. "But they're there. Mutants with magic. So you're obviously wrong."

"Or perhaps you're wrong about them. Perhaps they aren't mutant at all. And neither are you."

"Wait, what?" Adam stopped in his tracks. "What do you mean? We're not inhumans so what _else_ is there?"

"Something new."

"What do you mean by _that_?" Adam asked, growing more agitated by the second. "Hey! Wait up! You can't just say things like that and leave!"

But she was no longer talking that day.

* * *

They went out to the mountain again the next day and then again for every day the rest of the week, even though the heavy monsoon rains had come. They took different routes each time, hiking through the forest, along rivers, and across bogs until the mountain itself forced them home again; always they ended up at the edge of a cliff or before an unscalable wall or subtly and inexplicably rerouted by the mountain's twisting paths such that they simply just ended right back at the cabin.

The spirit herself didn't speak much, preferring to spend her time feeding or playing with Dante and Oscar, who by now have completely abandoned Adam's friendship. She answered his questions when it suited her mood but after that bit of mystery with mystics and mutants, she made no further effort to start conversation. When she did talk, she was unpredictable. Unlike her mother, who could have easily passed off as human, Maria Heredera was very obviously something other. One could forgive her surreal beauty, the impossible sheen of her dress, or even the unsettling grace with which she carried herself. Despite all these she could be overlooked as an extreme outlier of humanity if not for her extreme fickleness of character and mood, her absolute inability to behave in any other way except as how she genuinely felt, and her uncanny manner of knowing the most efficient permutation of words and gestures to be as incisive and subtly hurtful as possible. In these, her otherness revealed itself unmistakably, an otherness which was quite contrary to the otherness of her mother, who had been unnervingly constant and level-headed.

On his side, Adam grew restless over the weeks. It was an exercise that strained his tolerance and kept him in perpetual terror. He had thought it would take a day to rescue Ruixian, only that had grown into a week and now into a further three. In his uselessness, he could only imagine what her abductors had already done to her. And after his own detention in the Cube, he had become adept at picturing the most horrific things that could happen to a mutant. Sometimes, on his treks with Maria on Mount Arayat, an image of Ruixian would pop up in his head: her small body tied down to a gurney, torso cleaved open and her ribs pulled apart to reveal the secret workings of her mutant body.

At night especially, when the world was dark and Maria would not talk to him, his head would fill with unwanted thoughts of her. He would see her captors probing and slicing and carving her, testing the limits of her own electrokinesis: how much pain her powers could convince her nerves to ignore; how long she could starve before her synapses trigger a physiological reconfiguration to survive; or how far they could mutilate her until her powers failed to repair the flesh. The images festered and multiplied at night. There were times when the thought of her dead came to him as a comfort.

Sometimes, when these ruminations grew too obtrusive, he would spend the night in deep meditation. Away from grim speculations and toward happy memories. He thought of the Dama de Noche just outside his apartment, the white-washed brick façade of Le Jardin or the narrow shop-lined street up Melaka Rise. He tried not to think of Ruixian (that only defeated the exercise) or of the dogs, who no longer felt any love for him. He thought instead of old friends—Kate, Noh-varr and America most often, sometimes Cassie and Nate, but never Eli—and the Kaplans too—though only dimly for their memories, most of all, were wrapped in fogs of magic.

 _Kaplan, Kaplan, that's my name,_ he'd repeat to himself so he won't forget, though his first name had long been lost to him.

Sometimes, he would remember what it was to be a hero, to feel wind whipping through his hair and pulling on his tattered cape as he soared above the Manhattan skyline.

Or he would fixate on an imagined memory: a kiss shared amidst the stars and beneath him the universe unfolding like the pages of a comic book.

* * *

"Where do you go?" Maria asked one day.

They were inside a cave, where the air was salty and very wet, a few miles in from its mouth which they had discovered hidden behind a knot of vines. It would have been pitch-black too if it weren't for the bioluminescent algae clinging to the ceiling and creeping down the stalactite. The sickly cyan glow terrified Dante and Oscar, who crowded around Maria's legs and whined the whole way through.

"Hmmm?" Adam asked distractedly as he negotiated his way around a stalagmite. Unlike hers, his voicemade an echo.

"At night. Sometimes, you're not there, Lord Supreme."

"Oh. Um, I just meditate. Sometimes, I retreat into my mind."

"Huh. The other night, you disappeared," she added and then paused to consider the proper phrase. " _Kind of._ "

She had been with him for a little over three weeks now and had begun to absorb his speech and mannerisms. Her command of language had also become more nuanced; now, she came off belligerent only when she felt so, which was still too often for a summoned spirit.

"I'm not sure I understand what you mean by that," Adam said. "But don't worry about it"— _do spirits worry? For summoners who bind them against their will? Can they even feel worry at all?_ —"I just don't want to think about my friend."

They marched forward in silence for a stretch of time, Maria and the dogs in front, almost gliding around boulders and stalactites, and Adam some paces behind them, carefully and clumsily navigating the mossy floor.

"Tell me of her," Maria said as they came across a flat tract. There was the soft but unmistakable sound of running water ahead, not yet made visible by the weak light.

"Ruixian?"

"Who else, thick-skulled boy?"

Adam frowned at the awkward insult but decided ignored it. "What about her?"

"Why do you try to save her? Is she your…" she paused, frowning to find the word in her new lexicon. "… _girlfriend_?"

Adam snorted, loud enough that the sudden sound spooked the dogs. They barked at his laughter and then at the echoes of their own barks. He waited for them to calm down before replying.

"She's a friend. That's all." He said it with an amused smile that he knew she could see though she faced away from him.

"Oh."

There was another pause and it was after what felt like an hour that Maria spoke again.

"Do you have a lot of friends?" she asked as though she had spent the time reflecting on what he'd said.

"No," he said and then reconsidered. "I mean I used to. But not anymore."

"Why? Did they all die?" she asked with brutal nonchalance.

"I suppose _I_ died," he said, more to himself than to her. "Sorry, that sounds really corny."

"I understand now, my Lord Supreme."

"Understand what?"

"Why you killed my mother."

"I didn't—"

"It doesn't matter, blind child. Tell me more about the girl. How did you meet her?"

Adam sighed but he didn't push. Spirits were such strange things, with each its unique sort of strangeness; he'd go mad if he tried to understand them. "Almost two years ago, back in Singapore."

"I remember those times, Lord Supreme. Many of your kind joined the spirits. Most of them children."

"And she almost did too," he said with a sudden fury that surprised him. He jumped across the narrow stream and landed noisily, sending Dante and Oscar into another fit of barking. "God, she was just a student then. High school or junior college or something. At first they wanted to sterilize mutants and after that, they decided they were too dangerous. It's for national security, you see? So they arrested all registered mutants and transferred them to an offshore 'holding facility' better equipped to detain them. But they were never supposed to reach that prison. There was supposed to be an accident. I was in Seoul then."

"You saved her?"

Adam shook his head.

"A friend did. By the time I got to Singapore, Jacob had already taken care of the ships. I was just there to move the survivors to his safe houses." He paused thoughtfully before adding, "She was still so young then, probably the youngest prisoner since the government had been neutering mutants and X-gene carriers. Jacob saved about a thousand mutants that day, though all of them had already been sterilized. Ruixian didn't want to go with the big scary bald man who sank three frigates and killed all non-mutants onboard. So he entrusted her to me."

"And you've grown fond of her?"

"Not at first. She was shell-shocked for a while; every time her powers manifested, she would freeze and you won't be able to talk to her for hours on end. So I had to tend to this girl that I barely knew—God, I feel so selfish and terrible now, looking back to how I treated her in those days. I was very impatient. I even screamed at her sometimes."

"But you say you are friends now."

"Yeah… A couple of months after we moved to Madripoor, the Red Skull attacked and there were riots in Singapore. Mutants who managed to escape the Registration were being hunted and beaten to death. And Ruixian… she begged—she actually begged me to let her go so she could help. I said no, of course. Told her it was too dangerous. She couldn't even use her powers so how would she help? But she didn't care; she was like this other person, suddenly. Like a switch was suddenly flipped inside her. She screamed and cursed and begged and a few hours later I heard that she was on a boat over. They arrested her as soon as she was on Singaporean soil, of course. Didn't even put up a fight. How could she when she couldn't even use her powers without becoming catatonic? So obviously, I had to rescue her. _Again_. I remember being so pissed.

"Only when I got there, I got shot. It was really bad too. I was bleeding out and I was pretty sure that that was it for me. I was going to die. And this Ruixian, with no hesitation, she… she placed her hands on me and healed me. Her whole body was shaking and I could see it in her eyes. She was already coiling into herself and retreating to wherever it is she goes whenever her powers manifested.

"She saved a lot of people that day. Just her. I was too weak even after she healed me. But she just kept going. It was madness! I casted a projection spell to keep track of her and I just watched. I watched her saving all these people even though it broke a piece of her every time she used her powers. You're a spirit so you'd understand; even a mage of the lowest order can see these things when walking the astral plane. Ruixian just wasn't there anymore. She was somewhere very deep and dark. But she just kept going. Must have been a week before she finally stopped. No food. No water. No sleep. Nothing. Didn't even piss herself.

"And when it was all over, she was just gone, didn't come back for days. It was different this time. She saved me and all those people and it broke something inside her for good. I couldn't talk to her for weeks; I thought I might have had to commit her to some facility. In fact, I was already talking with Jacob about placing her in this hospital in Chamonix—I have a friend there, you see—and he was already making arrangements.

"But then suddenly, she was just back. Got up from her bed, took a shower, and then _complained_ that the noodles were overcooked. Whoever came back was a different person. It was like she figured something out. She was happier, more put together. She even started using her powers. It was like she had built a cocoon around herself and she finally emerged after weeks of transformation. I never asked what happened to her and she never volunteered anything. I suspect it was her own power repairing the circuitry in her brain. Using her powers to that extent in Singapore must have triggered something. Though, to be honest, I like to think it's more her than anything else. Just resilience of character, indomitability of the human spirit and all that, you know? But still... logically, I think it's her power that put her back together. She still has bad days even now—I don't think those would ever really go away. But most of the time, it was like being around a normal person. Sometimes, it even felt like she's the one taking care of me."

"Just one more week, my Lord Supreme. Just one more week," the Lady of the Mountain said in response. "You two will meet again, soon."

The ambiguity didn't escape him but he knew that she didn't mean to hurt him so he decided not to comment on it.

"She was sixteen, when she saved you?" Maria said after some time.

"Yeah. How did you know?"

"You were sixteen when you lost your name and became Adam Thorne."

"Just a coincidence, I suppose."

"Stupid boy. Such a thing is rare among beings of Fate, my Lord Supreme."

They walked further in until the cave began to constrict, marking the imminent end of their journey. At some point, they scrambled up a short wall, only to run into a dead end. Without a disappointed wrinkle on her placid face, Maria turned around and started walking back.

"These names," Adam said carefully. "They're so strange. How am I a being of Fate?"

"You are a wielder of Fate magic. Or _were_ , rather."

"You mean chaos magic?"

"A human term but yes, the same thing. "

"I have not used chaos magic since—"

"Since Adam Thorne?" Adam could hear the smile in her voice. "No matter how much you try to deny it, shameful child, it still resides inside you. You can't refuse who you are, Lord Supreme."

"I like to think that our circumstances don't define us and that we have a choice in who we want to be," Adam said resolutely. "And what about _Lord Supreme_? Why do you call your summoners that?"

"I've only been summoned this once," Maria said. "And perhaps Heir Supreme would be more fitting, considering you have not taken the name Sorcerer Supreme yet."

Adam stopped dead in his tracks. "But Doctor Strange—"

"—holds the seat no more. It was under his watch that the pestilence that called itself Mother infected and profaned this realm."

"But _I_ let Mother in!"

"And it was you who destroyed it, Heir Supreme, and in so doing, usurped Strange's right and duty."

"You have been playing me all this time, Maria Heredera," he said. "These long walks we take, what are you really on about?"

The spirit turned to him with a smug smile, looking very pleased with her mischief. In the unearthly glow of algae, she seemed so much like the apparition that she was. "Silly boy," she said again, only fondly this time with no real malice in her voice. Like a mother chiding her son. "No one remembers you here in this mortal plane but spirits do not forget, Adam Thorne. In your weakness and cowardice, you abandoned us. Spirits and magic-men alike, you abandoned us. Your name—your _true_ name, even now lost to us—drips with infamy. You are lucky I came at all."

As she said this, she reached down and scratched behind the dogs' ears, looking him in the eye meaningfully.

"I am not the Sorcerer Supreme. I'm not responsible for mystics or spirits or anyone! I can't be; it's too much weight for just one pair of shoulders," he said, blinking back. "And you can't put that on me!"

His words fell on deaf ears. Maria trained her eyes back on him but her gaze flitted past him. They made their way out side-by-side, now that they knew the terrain. The dogs followed close behind them, barking at the occasional water drip or heavy footstep.

"Humans are selfish, aren't they, Lord Supreme?" Maria said when they finally emerged from the cave.

The mountain had changed, he finally realized. There was no birdsong, no howling of nocturnal beasts, not even chirping of insects. The only sound came from Dante and Oscar chasing each other in a tight circle, happy to be finally out of the cave and back on the world of light and air.

"Yes, they are, Maria," Adam said absently as he looked up at the black clouds blanketing the sky. He squinted in the dark, trying to readjust his eyes to the dark afternoon. Then he turned his eyes to the tree line and looked for the clear path that they had taken. And then, almost like an afterthought, added, "I should say 'we' since I'm also human and also incredibly selfish."

Maria took on a bright yellow glow. She took Adam's hand and led him to the forest.

"Though it could be argued that one has the right to some measure of selfishness," he added with a challenging raise of his eyebrow.

"So long as no harm is done to others?"

"So long as no harm _through action_ is done to others."

Maria turned to him and smirked. "Clever boy." she said. "Wretched, selfish, clever boy."

"Spirits are known to be pedantic," Adam said with a shrug. "Harm through action and harm through inaction are different things. You shouldn't do something that will hurt another person, obviously. But at the same time, no one should be able force you to do anything. Not give all your money away. Or even help others. Much less, give up your life. No one—no matter how powerless _or powerful_ —should be slave to another."

"Said the summoner to his bound spirit," Maria said quietly and then, before he could respond, added, "Even when the cost of inaction is the life of another? Are noble heroes not held to a higher code?"

"I'm no hero."

"By all rights of power and privilege, you are Sorcerer Supreme, selfish boy; all magic pays a price for the things that you do."

"I've done nothing!" he protested.

"Pitiful, hateful, broken child. By doing nothing, you have undone everything," Maria said angrily. When Adam looked at her eyes, they were wet. "How many magicians have you encountered in the past year? How many fairies have you seen on my mother's mountain? Do you remember the lambanas? Don't look away, my Lord Supreme! Look me in the eye, despicable boy, look me in the eye. Where are they now? Where are the lambanas? Have you seen any yet?"

"I have not," he was forced to admit.

Maria turned away from him and stared ahead. "Your magic is fading, my Lord Supreme."

"It is."

"All magic is fading."

"I think I've known for a while now. It shouldn't have taken so much just to commune with a mountain spirit," he said. "And that's why we need the full moon and the lambanas for the spell."

"Then you must also know that you are at the center of it."

Adam laughed bitterly. "Hah! Of course, I am. Of course! It's always my fault somehow; the universe seems to have given me monopoly on blame! But tell me how. How is this new crisis my fault?"

"Without a true Sorcerer Supreme, magic cannot enter this universe."

"And so long as I do not accept the Supremacy, I do not ascend to become Sorcerer Supreme, yes?" Adam said viciously. "So that's why I haven't seen any mystics lately. No fairies. No lambanas." He paused abruptly and then added gently as realization dawned on him, "And that's why your mother died."

"We are beings of pure magic, child. The most powerful spirits were the first to disappear. All the demons and angels. Most of the fairies and lambanas are gone too," Maria said with no hint of sadness. "My mother… she held on for so long, much longer than ancient spirits were entitled to. But in the end, she was too weak. One day, humans came from the north. They had machines. Then there was a fire…"

The rest of that story hung unspoken over them but Adam didn't have to guess the rest of it.

There was a chill that marked a passing rain, which gave the air the smell of mud and wet leaves. They walked on a narrow curving path, between thick forestry and under an even more impenetrable covering of branches and leaves. The whole world had plunged into darkness and there was no sound except for Adam's footsteps and the dogs' breathing. Maria, glowing divinely not unlike some apparition of the Virgin Mary, was the only light in the corridor of darkness.

"You can't ask this of me," he said suddenly. "How could you expect me to be Sorcerer Supreme, when I can't even be _me_? I can only be Adam Thorne."

But as usual, Maria gave him no answer. They came out to a meadow upon a hill, where an explosion of stars peeked between the dissipating clouds. The wind nipped at Adam's exposed neck and immediately, Maria began to radiate heat to comfort him.

She spoke again, as if there had been no interim in the conversation. And, like all spirits, her mind operated unpredictably, branching out and making tangents in the most arbitrary manners.

"We are the same, Lord Supreme," she said. "You and I."

"Yeah?"

"We are both cynics!"

"Are we?"

"Why, yes! I am a realist, who sees the world for its ugliness."

"Well, I don't. I think there is also a lot of hope in this world. I think it has the capacity for beauty and kindness. Maybe not in everyone—definitely not in me—but it exists."

"Despite all you've seen, you still say that humans are capable of beauty and kindness?"

"Yes."

"Despite what they've done to the witches and the druids and the shamans and the albularyo, what they do now to mutants, and what they will do to the next outcast?"

"Yes, even then."

"Even when the noblest of their kind—the heroes—have failed? Despite your own selfishness?"

"Yes, even then. No matter what, Maria, the answer is always yes. The way I see it, life's most fundamental nature must be change. That is true down to the cellular level of every life form on the goddamned evolutionary tree. And where there is hope of change, there is hope for something better. So, yes! I believe that while this world is ugly, there is still hope. Human beings _could be_ good. And that makes us worth it."

"You let your hoping do your thinking for you. Quite stupid for a sorcerer," Maria said. "You are a true idiot, Lord Supreme."

"I am an idealist."

Maria laughed, soft and high like bells. "The most bitter kind of cynic," she said.

They were almost at the cabin now. Dante and Oscar had run ahead and were barking excitedly with their front legs up against the front door. Maria glided forward to let them in and when she opened the door, the stale smell of herbs and mold wafted out. She turned to Adam and closed the door behind her.

"What are you doing?" he asked.

"Would you make a deal with me?"

"That we should keep secret from the dogs?"

"They distract me, Lord Supreme."

"Summoners implore spirits, not the other way around."

"And so it has been since the first spirit summoned," she said simply, as if reciting a line she had memorized from a book.

"Then you know you are breaking the rules."

"There's not much magic left in the rules to punish me."

Adam studied the spirit with narrowed eyes. She was so beautiful in the dark, so ethereal, though it was never beauty that he sought in a spirit's face—even in those which suggested a male form. But there was something to her face—female though it may be—that drew him, that made him want to touch her and in turn be touched by her. Adam gazed into that beckoning face now and felt the urge to hold it between his palms. He hadn't thought much of it before but now an understanding was dawning on him. Her fickleness and her brutal honesty. All those walks… he didn't have to indulge her. Everything fell into place and he finally realized the sad truth behind Maria Heredera.

"Oh, Maria…"

For the first time, the spirit looked cowed. Maria crossed her arms over her chest, as if to cover herself in shame. She bent forward, her long hair falling over and obscuring her face. She seemed to be shrinking into herself like she meant to make her self smaller and less visible.

"I'm so sorry, Maria," Adam said. "But I can't bring her back."

"I know that." Maria peered at him through her hair. "But I don't know what else to do."

She stayed in that position for a while before drawing herself up, straightening her back and lifting her chin to recover her dignity. She looked some inches taller than usual.

"A deal, my Lord Supreme."

Adam considered the spirit before him and said with as much courtesy he could muster, "You have nothing to offer me."

"I offer you a secret."

"A secret of spirits?"

Maria shook her head. "A secret of humanity."

"Is it important?"

"I am no trickster spirit, child."

Adam crossed his arms and closed his eyes in consternation. "And in return for this secret?"

"Consider the ascension to Supremacy."

"No," Adam said immediately and with a hardness that surprised them both.

"Just promise me, Lord Supreme, that you'll think it over, seriously and fairly. For the survival of my people and yours."

Adam opened his eyes and bit his lip. "Fine," he said.

"Thank you," she said with a smile. "My Lord Supreme, thank you." Her eyes sparkled with brimming tears.

"So the secret in exchange for my promise?"

Maria's face turned grave. "My Lord Supreme," she began carefully. "Listen close and listen well.

"There is something terribly wrong. An infection spreads secretly among your kind, which, left uncontrolled, will end with your extinction."

"An infection?" Adam frowned. "Among mutants? Hardly new."

"Not so, silly child." Maria shook her head emphatically. "Mutants… mystics… all humans... even the ones you call _in_ humans. _Homo sapiens_ will perish."

" _All_ of humanity?" Adam raised an eyebrow. "That's a little dramatic, don't you think?"

"I cannot lie."

"And when you said 'extinction' you meant—"

"—of the human race."

Adam's brows furrowed in thought. "How long?"

"Two years."

" _T-two years?!_ " Adam said with wide-eyed surprise. "Is it a virus? Bacteria? Mode of infection?"

Maria shook her head again. "No spirit of Earth has seen such a thing before, my Lord Supreme. We know only that a blight spreads among your kind."

"So you know close nothing," Adam stated with a touch of asperity. "What would I do with information so nebulous?"

"As nebulous as the promise I have extracted from you, greedy wretch."

Adam clicked his tongue and turned away with a roll of his eyes. "Fair enough."

They remained outside the cabin for a long while, sitting side by side on the wet grass under a sky painted with stardust and scurrying clouds. It was an easy silence, as if nothing of grave importance had just passed between them. They watched a half-moon emerge behind the mountain and climb the sky without a single word between them.

Adam spent the hours wrapped in a swirl of thoughts: of Ruixian mostly and the fact that in a week there might not be much of her left to find; of becoming Sorcerer Supreme and the choice between duty and freedom that confronted him again; and of the affliction surreptitiously decimating humanity. He thought of the life he had been dreaming of, a life free of magic and duty. A life free of hurting others with a power that he couldn't control. There was an infection inside him too, he decided idly. Chaos magic—or _Fate_ magic, as the spirit called it. Primordial, powerful, _unfettered_ magic that had brought only destruction and madness through the tragic person of the Witch.

They sat together, man and spirit, until the rosy fingers of dawn unfurled across the sky. And as the soft light spilled on his face, Adam's thoughts, for the first time in days, turned to the _Ars Notoria_.

* * *

On the day of the full moon, they summoned the lambanas.

They came from the forest with no ceremony but for the soft rustling of leaves that heralded their arrival. The two sauntered to the cabin where Adam and Maria waited and presented themselves to the Heir Supreme with a deep bow.

"Our Lord Supreme," they said in high chirping voices. "We are the lambanas of Mother Arayat."

"I welcome you, honorable lambanas," Adam said in a rehearsed tone. "I am the mage Adam Thorne and this is my spirit-companion Maria Heredera."

The sprites stood up and Adam saw that they were bare-breasted. They had a thin piece of red cloth wrapped around their waists some inches above their sex, which was bushy and exposed, and had leaves woven in their thick black hair, which framed their soft-looking faces. Their eyes were wide puddles of brown.

"We know of you," the first one said.

"And we know _her,_ " the second one added with a sideways glance to Maria.

"I thank you for heeding my call, sisters dear," Maria said.

"Do not thank us, wretch; we had no choice," the first one said without looking at Maria. She studied Adam intently, a frown etched deep in her face. "You are Lady of the Mountain, so we have come."

"But do not presume to think that we would do more than what is needed to respect your birthright," the second one said. "The trees of Arayat will not shed a single rotten leaf for your cause."

"Where we can, we'll do nothing," the two said together.

"Then let _me_ beseech you, hallowed lambanas," Adam said to them. "I beg your powers to retrieve a friend."

Quite suddenly, the two advanced on him, taking turns to push his shoulders until he was pressed against the cabin wall. Inside, the dogs barked at the dull thud.

"How dare you," the first one snarled. "Ask favors of us?"

"Save a life for you?" the second one added. "When so many of us are dead for your idleness?"

The two leaned close to him, so that their faces were only an inch from his and he could feel the warmth of their breath.

Their eyes glowed a deep electric green. "No," they said together.

The lambanas took a step back and bowed. They held the position, clearly waiting for something to happen. Adam let them endure the posture of deference for a while before turning to Maria with a brusque nod.

"Sisters, I release you," Maria said.

A strong wind gathered around them, kicking up dust clouds. As one, the lambanas stood straight and spread their arms. The wind buoyed and carried them swiftly into the forest as if they weighed no more than fallen leaves.

"You're not surprised, are you, my Lord Supreme?" Maria asked as the gust vanished abruptly.

"Not really," Adam said. "I mean what did you expect? We did kill their mother."

Maria answered the accusation with silence.

"What now?" he asked instead.

"I'm not powerful enough to bring your friend here."

"Then, send me to her instead," Adam suggested readily, having expected this turn of events.

"Look at you, little mage," Maria said with an amused smile. "Still a hero, after all."

* * *

When the night of the full moon finally came, it was almost anticlimactic.

They waited for the moon to reach its zenith, as Maria stood in the center of a glade and Adam waited patiently in front of her, ready to leave any moment. He had put on a fresh pair of trousers and a thick long-sleeved shirt under a scarlet hooded robe. He carried a small backpack of herbs, candles, and American dollars. Just the bare necessities.

He had said his farewells, which, though heartfelt, did not overwhelm Maria with sadness. He had tried to say goodbye to Dante and Oscar too but they would not let him near them, so he settled with saying it out loud from a distance, as they played among themselves and paid him no attention. He wanted to apologize too but couldn't bring himself to it. The price had been paid and must remain so.

The moon reached its peak and Maria looked up into its silver glare. Her eyes turned a deep red.

 _Here I come, Ray,_ Adam thought to himself, adjusting the clasp of his robe. _I'm coming for you. Alive or dead, you're going home._

Adam rolled his shoulders and stretched his fingers. Electricity danced across his skin and magic poured into his marrow. Once more, he felt the strings wrapped around his left wrist, making sure he had done the knots as Maria had taught him.

"I have found her," Maria declared. "A mage had enshrouded her."

"Powerful?"

"Yes," she said solemnly. "But not as powerful as you, my Lord Supreme."

She turned to him and stared with her red seeing eyes.

"She is alive but only barely. Oh, my Lord Supreme, the things they've done to her body. Her legs... Her poor, poor legs."

Adam released a shaky breath, which turned into a laugh halfway through. And then he fortified himself for the rescue. "Send me, Maria. Now"

"This is goodbye, my Lord Supreme." Maria placed a hand on Adam's shoulder and gripped it tight. "Do not forget your promise."

Adam nodded in acknowledgement. "Goodbye, Maria."

There was the sensation of being turned inside out, followed by a dream-like impression of falling. Darkness rose around him as the world fell away under his feet. He was falling down and down and down into a bottomless pit until the only thing he could see, as he gazed up the black walls of the night, was the sad face of Maria Heredera, spirit of the forest fire.

* * *

He touched ground inside a metal cabinet, in an unknown room in an unknown building in an unknown country.

The space could barely hold him so he struggled to keep still while he found his bearings. He smelled clean air, a mix of ethanol, bleach, and iodine, but underneath the antiseptic veneer was the undercurrent of something sour and corrosive and something else that had a distinct fishy smell.

He smirked as he Saw a quivering blanket of refractive magic hovering a mile or so above what he assumed was the entire complex. It was intricately designed and deftly woven—the mark of a classically trained mage. Adam sent a sliver of his own magic to its gleaming underside and felt it disperse into harmless shreds. It was a protective barrier, he decided, meant to repel magical attacks and to ward against mystic espionage. He wondered how Maria had managed to send him through; perhaps the magic of spirits obeyed different rules.

There was a crack of light running vertically between the two steel doors of the cabinet. Slowly, Adam shifted to align his eye to the crack and he studied the space outside, taking care to breathe quietly and to avoid knocking the bottles on the shelf behind him.

It was difficult to judge the size of the room from this vantage point. There were tables, machines, and other cabinets—all doused with a deep yellow light that annoyed his eye—and plastic curtains hanging from the ceiling to give the area an illusion of privacy from the rest of the laboratory. Built into the ceiling were square vents spaced about five or so feet apart and directly beneath them, on the floor, were narrow grills.

He could see four men wrapped in what he guessed were hazmat or clean room suits standing over four stainless steel tables with their backs to him. Each had a smaller table beside him, from where he retrieved and replaced various surgical implements and jars. Adam didn't have to guess what the men were doing and yet, as one stepped away from his work, he almost threw up when he saw the bag on the operating table.

It was an inflated plastic box, just large enough to encase a small child—rectangular, transparent, with a pair of gloves sown on the side facing Adam. Even at a distance and in the harsh yellow light, he could recognize the ground up mix of flesh and bone and the vital organs that were left for harvesting. It reminded him of the paste he sometimes made for his spells by crushing chicken parts with a mortar and pestle. A small mass in the box stirred and fell to one side and Adam found himself staring at a blue eye. He was about to look away when he saw something that chilled him to the bone: the child blinked.

Adam's body moved as if he were in a dream. He eased the cabinet open and stepped out into the yellow light. One foot forward, then the other next, footsteps quick, quiet, and confident. His left hand lifted in a daze and from his fingers electricity shot off in four zigzag arcs, lancing across the air until they found their targets; the men were dead before they hit the floor.

Without breaking stride, he stepped over one of the bodies and walked up to the child, not knowing what to do or say. He held his shaking hands over the mutilated form, hopeless for a spell that could knit the meat into something that would restore some semblance of dignity. And he knew, as he looked at the face of humanity's cruelty, that he was powerless to save the child.

Inside the box was red pulp where arms and legs should have been. Even the torso had been so pulverized that it took a while to identify the organs that had been purposely left intact to keep the child alive, like islands in a sea of mush: there was the heart, still beating, the lungs that inflated and deflated grotesquely like a pair of gray balloons inside a glistening ribcage, the kidneys, the liver, thoracic arteries and veins, and even the trachea. A testicle remained, skinned and exposed, but the other one had already been harvested and detached from the vas deferens. No stomach or intestines or anything of the digestive tract. It was almost impossible to know that it was human if not for what was left of the face. The lower jaw had been ripped off and an eye was missing but the other one was swiveling wildly in its socket.

"Witchboy," a voice croaked from an adjacent table, just barely audible. "You came. Fucking at last."

Adam tore his eyes away from the boy and went over to Ruixian's table. She was in a larger box just long enough to hold her length but her body, while obviously injured, was still unbroken. He glanced at the other two boxes and saw the same butchery as in the child's box. Unlike the other three, Ruixian was hooked up to an IV drip. Adam grabbed a scalpel from a tray and slashed at the plastic.

"How long?" he asked as he worked at tearing open a big enough hole to help Ruixian out.

"Ten minutes."

Adam gave her a surprised look as he sawed through the plastic.

"What," she said. Her voice was rough and distant, like she wasn't really there. "I've had a lot of practice lately. The others, are they—?"

"Dead. Except for this one to your right."

"You think I can—"

Adam shook his head. "It's really bad, Ray. The-there's not much left of him."

"I want to see."

He could see her face through the hole now, bruised, skeletal and bald. Her white shift draped loosely over her, making no noticeable bulge at the chest or hips; she couldn't have weighed more than eighty pounds.

"He's just eight, you know," she said. "He had the softest blond hair before they shaved it off."

Adam pried open the slash he'd made and helped Ruixian crawl through. Placing her feet experimentally on the floor, she tried to stand and promptly fell to the floor with a brittle-sounding crack. She slung an arm over Adam's neck and sat back on the table edge with a whimper, taking quick shallow breaths through her teeth.

"Break my legs," she said in between pants.

"What?"

"They messed up my legs," she said as she ripped off the needle from her arm. "They broke and set them wrong. They wanted to see if the alignment would self-correct when I healed. Now, we know. I need you to place one hand just below the knee—yes, there—and the other one here, just above the ankle. That's the tibia, the big bone. Push at the count of three, all right?"

Ruxian flinched and made a muffled moan. As soon as he had broken the bone, Adam felt microcurrents beginning to stimulate cellular repair.

"How long for the leg?" he asked, eyeing the corridor behind the plastic curtain.

"Just a few seconds. Do the other one now."

Adam moved to her other side and placed his hands on her other leg. By the time he was done breaking it, Ruixian was already testing the other leg, carefully flexing and pointing the foot.

As he waited for the last leg to heal, Adam placed his bag beside her and took out a black string from the front pocket. He grabbed her left wrist and began chanting. One round clockwise, two rounds back, knot the end, leave a finger space. Smear the knot with blood. Two rounds clockwise, three rounds back, knot the end, leave two finger spaces. Smear the knot with blood. Three. Four. Five… over and over until he ran out of string, making twelve cycles around her bony wrist in total. She was so skinny; the same length of string only made nine cycles around his wrist.

"What's this?" Ruixian asked as she gingerly placed one foot on the ground.

"A kind of charm. To help escape."

"Can't you teleport us out?"

Adam shook his head. "Not from here. There's a barrier over the whole complex. How long before you're ready?"

"Two minutes," she said while she walked over to the boy's table.

She studied the child for a long while, quietly imagining ways to repair the body. "I can't fix this, Adam," she said finally. She placed a hand into one of the gloves and laid a finger over the beating heart. The remaining blue eye swiveled in its socket and looked at her. Ruixian closed her eyes and shook her head.

"His mutation hasn't even manifested yet," she said softly. "They were too curious so they decided they couldn't wait. They cut him open to figure it out themselves."

A door opened and shut somewhere behind them, followed by the sharp sound of high-heeled footsteps falling on tiled floor.

"Ray, we have to go. Someone's coming."

Ruixian turned to Adam and nodded. A small spark leapt from her finger and the boy's brain began to smoke. The heart stopped beating and the lungs deflated for the last time.

"Bye, Teddy," she murmured and leaned down to kiss the plastic box.

She grabbed Adam's hand and they ran for the door.

* * *

The complex wasn't as large as Adam had feared but the corridors were clogged with human traffic and there were no windows to differentiate day or night, making it impossible to figure out where he was by way of timezones. Scientists, guards, and suit-wearing administrators pressed around them as they followed the stream to the exit.

"There are too many people," he said. "Why are there so many people?"

Beside him, under his arm and cloak, Ruixian dragged her feet, looking the very image of fatigue. "The building goes deep. Mostly labs, administrative offices, and classrooms up here," she said. "The bottom floors are pens, holding facilities, cages; storage for mutants, basically. Lots of manpower needed."

"Classrooms?"

Ruixian nodded grimly. "This is a teaching facility."

The seething mass of humanity crowded around them, crammed against walls and each other like rush hour on a Madripoor train—a superorganism of individuals performing different tasks to fulfil the singular purpose of keeping the organized whole functional. Bodies slid and slipped over each other and now and then, a person would detach itself from the swirling bulk and slither into a room, like a tendril seeking out a niche, or some researcher or bureaucrat would emerge through a door and merge with the crawling pace.

A door to their right opened and a woman in a lab coat stepped out. Her eyes landed squarely on Ruixian and her mouth formed a small 'o'. Then, a crease formed between her brows and she turned away, overcome suddenly by a concern more pressing than an escaping mutant.

"Are you sure about this?" Ruixian asked, warily eying the woman as she melted into the crowd. She clung feebly to his arm. "We're not really invisible."

Adam gave her shoulder a reassuring squeeze. "They won't see us unless we bring attention to ourselves," he said as he brought his hand in front of her face and shook the charm around his wrist. "But try not to bump against anyone and don't look them in the eye."

"Okay," Ruixian said, breathing heavily.

"We should slow down a bit," he said, giving her a quick scan. "You've lost a lot of weight, Ray."

She looked up to him and nodded weakly.

They were walking behind a tall man in camos, using his wide frame as a wedge to clear the path and as a shield to hide their faces from incoming traffic. Even with the conspicuous scarlet robe and Ruixian's bare feet and thin shift, nobody seemed to even notice them and those who happened to look their way could never quite focus their eyes on the space that they occupied. Adam kept his head down and his eyes lowered. He kept one hand around the hilt of a knife in one of the hidden pockets of his robe and his other arm in a gentle grip around Ruixian's shoulders. He could hardly feel any muscle beneath the skin.

"How much farther?" Ruixian asked. She was leaning heavily against him now.

Adam pressed his thumb and forefinger together and made a circle. Closing the other eye, he peered through the hole and slowly Looked left and right. For the third time, he mapped the labyrinth of corridors and rooms and traced their path, careful not to Look at the barrier overhead.

"We're three rooms from the exit," he said, opening his eyes. "Hang on, we're almost there."

The charm spun rapidly around his wrist, protecting him from observing eyes as they made their way down the corridors. A few times, someone bumped against his shoulder but when they turned to glare at him, their eyes glazed and seemed to slide over him.

"There. I can see the door, Ray. Just a little bit more," he said as a pair of metal doors came to view. They opened and closed intermittently and Adam caught the glimpse of a blue sky beyond. "Ray, do you— _fuck._ "

He almost didn't catch her when she slipped out of his grasp and fell forward. Behind him, a woman tripped and crashed on his back. Somehow, he managed to get up and put some distance between them before passers-by took notice. The woman, flushing a brilliant scarlet, looked like she was about to apologize when a sudden thought came over her. She shook her head as if to clear it and stepped around the two to rejoin the stream of people.

"Sorry," Ruixian muttered.

Adam removed his backpack and passed it to her. "Take this and get on," Adam said, offering his back. "I'll carry you the rest of the way."

"No, I can—"

"Dammit, Ray, we don't have time for this," he said. "Just get the fuck on and let me handle this."

She managed a weak glare but relented anyway. With some muttering, she put on the bag and climbed on Adam's back, hanging her thin arms over his shoulders.

"Cross your arms around my neck and hang on," he said uselessly as he placed his arms under her thighs and stood up. He felt her arms encircle his neck, feather-light and obviously too weak with no real force behind them. _Too light_ , he thought. _Too light and too weak._ "All right, here we go."

He wove through the small gaps between clusters of people, keeping his head down as he fluidly made his way to the front and eliciting no more than surprised gasps and some clicking of tongues.

Just a few more yards from the front door. He could already feel the cool air from the flapping doors.

"Adam," Ruixian whispered urgently to his ear. "Look there, just above the door."

Adam risked a glance and saw a metal bar with blinking lights. He made a slow stop.

"I think it's a card reader for employees," she said. "And a chip detector for subjects."

"They _tagged_ you?" he hissed, and felt her nod against his right ear. "I can't short it electropathically; lightning bolts would be hard to ignore even with the charm. I can try a spell but it will take time, give me—"

"I can do it."

Adam thought it over. "Are you sure? I can—"

"My powers are subtler than yours."

"I know. But a spell will only take—"

"Adam," she said firmly, though in a labored voice. "I don't want to stay in this place for one more second."

"Ray, I… All right," Adam said. "All right. I'll leave it to you."

"Good. Approach slow but go through fast when I give the signal."

Adam nodded and started walking again, heeding her instructions to advance slowly. He could feel her tense up against him as she reached out with her powers to probe the detector. An invisible but harmless electric field passed through him, interacting subtly with his own mutant powers. Breathing quietly through his mouth, he slowed down further and waited for the signal that she was ready.

"Ray—"

"I almost got it. Just shut up for a while."

"Okay, just—make the waveform a little tighter. Suppress the amplitude."

Ruixian responded with an annoyed groan. Some seconds passed before she finally made a gentle tap against Adam's shoulder. He felt the field strength intensify and knew that she had begun working on the detector. He quickly took the last few steps, passed under the detector, and walked out the door. He stepped out into the sunlight, relieved that no alarm had sounded. He could even feel Ruixian relaxing as she loosened her grip around his neck.

"We did it," she whispered, her shallow breath ghosting on his neck as she panted.

Then, a hand grabbed his left forearm and threw him bodily across the threshold.

"Ray!" he shouted as he felt her body separate from his.

He crashed heavily on his side but even as the ground scraped his skin, he extended a hand in Ruixian's direction and gestured a Form to soften her landing with a cushion of air. Struggling to his feet, he positioned himself between Ruixian and their attacker.

"Stay back!" he said. His robe flared open behind him, hiding her from their attacker's line of sight. There was some screaming around him, as people cleared the space and ran for the gates.

The man made a sign of binding with his left hand and the crowd yelped and groaned as belts unwound themselves from waists and flew toward Adam and Ruixian. Adam Formed the counter-gesture and the belts dropped lifelessly to the ground.

" _Oho_!" the man said with an amused look. " _T'es magicien_!"

Adam unclipped his robe and brought out his knife. He held it before him, eyeing the man's belly, and electrified it in his grip. He was up against a mage; he must strike with the intent to kill.

With a sudden cry, he pushed against the ground and propelled himself forwards, bringing down the knife into his target. The air crackled and hissed as the blade cut through space.

" _Oho!_ " the man said again. With an angular motion of his left hand, the mage conjured a glossy sheen between them, halting the knife's descent just a hair's breadth over his belly. "Hah!" Cackling, he jabbed two fingers into the flesh above Adam's hip bone and made a popping sound with his lips.

Adam had no time to repel the attack. There was a tearing sensation in his side as heat ripped through the protective spells he had woven into his skin, penetrating deep enough to puncture a kidney. The explosion extended beyond his body and the shock of rapidly expanding air blew him backwards a few yards, forcing him to his knees.

"Fuck," he muttered. He had miscalculated. Blood was already dripping down his side, soaking through his shirt, but the pain was still a distant abstraction. In front of him, the mage smiled viciously as he wiped bloodied fingers on his pants.

Quickly, despite the pain, Adam scampered to his feet and placed protectively in front of Ruixian, who was huddled unconscious on the ground. She was already wrapped in his robe and that had shielded her from the blast. The lingering spectators were not so lucky; around them were the charred bodies of those who were too close to the explosion.

" _Tu me comprends_?" the mage asked as he walked towards them.

Adam crouched lower and brought his knife higher before him. With his other hand, he gestured a series of Forms, weaving additional layers of protection in the robe's fabric.

The man pointed at Ruixian with an open palm. " _Tu protéges cette chienne? Ta copine ou quoi?_ " he said with a sneer. "Your whore, yes?"

Adam spied a small structure to his right. No people coming out, probably empty. With scarcely a thought, his robe wrapped itself tighter around Ruixian and flew her towards the building's rooftop.

The man made a move towards her but Adam quickly intercepted his flight. With a grunt, he caught the man's ankle and swung him hard to the ground, away from Ruixian.

Adam pressed a hand over his wound as he watched the mage rolled on the dirt. "Fucker," he muttered, catching his breath as he fell back on his knees. He risked a moment to look down and saw that blood—his blood—was flowing copiously down his leg.

A sudden movement to his left caught his eye and, to his despair, he saw two more mages—a woman and a man—emerged from a nearby building. "Fuck," Adam muttered again as they joined the first mage, who was already climbing to his feet some yards away.

He was exhausted, injured, and outnumbered. On a good day he could have taken two but three strained his chances. With a curse under his breath and a quick Form behind his back, he dug a penny out of his pocket and held it high over his head. The woman was the first to look and before she could figure out the feint, Adam flipped the coin as high as he could. Her eyes followed it, up and up and up, already trapped in his Trick and unable to tear her attention from the spinning penny.

With a shout, he thrust both hands before him, twisted his fingers into a sequence of elaborate Forms, and slammed his palms to the ground. Immediately, there was another explosion and the ground under his attackers broke apart in a cloud of dust and projectile rocks, giving him enough cover and a head start. He sprinted for Ruixian as fast as he could, pumping magic into his thighs to propel himself farther with each step. Heart pounding, muscles burning, he pushed himself to the limits of endurance, even as magic extracted its cost from his body. He could feel his lungs on fire as he drew in ragged panting breaths and already there were black spots popping in and out of his vision. Behind him, an enraged scream split the air as the two men worked together to dispel his spell.

Adam was vaulting over a half-wall when he heard the sizzle of a familiar spell. With his body parallel to the ground, he flew over the structure and twisted in the air to narrowly avoid twin beams of light that had been aimed at his arms. With one palm he deflected the blasts away from building and with another he threw a lightning bolt, striking one man in the chest. The mage crumpled to the ground and didn't get up.

Distracted, Adam landed clumsily on his feet. He slipped backwards and, carried by his own momentum, crashed against the building's wall, knocking the air out of his lungs. He gasped and fell to the ground in a heap.

"Hold!" The other man—the one who had grabbed him by the door—had caught up to him. With another gesture of binding, two cords emerged from his sleeves and slithered across the ground and up Adam's arms, wrapping themselves around his wrists and holding them over his head so that he floated a few inches off the ground. They must have been spelled too, for his hands lost all sense of touch and he could not command his fingers to bend and make Forms.

"No more running," the mage said. Panting, he made his slow approach and, with another Form, his hand took on a deadly red glow.

Adam squeezed his eyes shut and began chanting, only to feel another cord slither around his neck and squeeze, choking off his words. His eyes bulged out as his chest struggled for air.

"You die now, filth-lover," the man said as he gently placed his hand on Adam's chest. He was so close now that Adam could smell the sour heat of his breath.

Adam's mouth opened in a silent scream as his flesh, no longer protected by magic, sizzled and smoked under the man's touch. He could smell his skin burning and he might have retched if not for the cord wrapped around his neck.

The man laughed. "No use screaming, filth-fucker. Your whore die next. But I think I will first—"

The mage paused and frowned. "I will first—" Then, his eyes fluttered closed and he fell to one side with a thud. Behind him the woman—last of the three mages—stood with wide-eyed shock, her own glowing hand now glistened with her comrade's blood. Weeping quietly, she pulled at the cords around Adam's neck, her hands trembling uncontrollably and her nails digging into soft flesh.

Oxygen rushed back into Adam's lungs and he took a moment to cough and wheeze for the air that he desperately needed. "Thank y—"

"That was my brother, Sorcerer Supreme!" the woman cried hysterically, trembling hand gesturing wildly at the man fallen by her feet. "Now, go! Survive or we all die!"

She made a quick twisting gesture with her left hand and the cords around Adam's wrists tightened and dragged him up the wall. His shoulders protested at the sudden acceleration and for a while he panicked when the strain on his lungs prevented him from breathing again. Then, once he had reached on the rooftop, the cords fell away from his wrists and he fell on his back.

And he could breathe again, finally. He hungrily sucked in the air, panting and groaning, and squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. When he had finally gathered himself, he turned his head and saw that he had landed a few feet from the red cloak, which was still wrapped protectively around Ruixian. He clamped one hand over his wound and crawled over to her.

"Ray. Are you okay? Ray." It took a few nudges before she stirred under the pile of cloth. "Ray, the bag. I can—"

A door banged open somewhere close by and men poured out to the rooftop, surrounding them on one side. "Don't move! Hold your hands up!" one of them shouted.

Sixteen men, to Adam's quick count, all armed with assault rifles and what looked like grenades. Even as he lay on the ground, he moved to raise his hands in surrender but the men open fired anyway. Quicker than thought, his robe detached itself from Ruixian and flew around them in a scarlet fury, easily arresting the rain of bullets, which fell around them in a perfect crescent.

"Ruixian, are you okay?" he asked over the sound of gunshot, twisting on the ground next to her. His breaths came quick and shallow and the strain of using the robe felt like a hammer striking his head.

"Adam, look," she said weakly, lifting a bony finger towards the sky.

Adam turned his head and followed her line of sight. The aircraft was hovering just above them, casting a shadow that wasn't there before. The insignia, painted in white against black, was clear and unmistakable even through the red haze of pain.

"It's over. We're done," Ruixian said as she closed her eyes and clutched his hand.

Adam's breath caught in his throat and his heart skipped a beat, made paralyzed and bloodless as if he had suddenly plunged in a pool of icy water. "Oh, no," he managed to croak in a half-voice filled with dread. A hatch opened from the ship's belly.

"They've sent an Avenger."


	3. Avenger

Author's notes: Okay, so I think I didn't quite understand the rating system for . I had to clean up the last part of this chapter to make it conform (Hopefully. I tried my best; please tell me if i need to edit further. If not, I'll keep it as is.) to community standards. If you'd like to read the original version, this story is also available on ao3. Enjoy, and tell me what you think! :)

* * *

 **Avenger**

Adam rolled on his back and squinted against the orange sun, barely making out the ship's silhouette in the twilight glare.

"Hold!" One of the men raised a fist over his shoulder, abruptly ceasing the hail of bullets. He pressed on his earpiece and whispered something that Adam couldn't hear.

Then a figure dove out of the craft, sleek and black against the sunset sky as it fell down an impressive height, twisting and turning in the air. It somersaulted a controlled descent and landed on one knee with a muffled thump.

Adam kept one hand pressed over his wound while he slowly extricated the other one from Ruixian's death grip. _Sixteen men. One Avenger,_ he thought over the stabbing pain radiating from his side. There was a long moment of anticipation as mage and Avenger stared each other down, each measuring the other up. He would have made a pretty sight—broken body supine on the ground, craning his neck to see the Avenger as blood poured out of his side—while the Avenger cut a regal figure as he stood up, strong, purposeful, and confident in his standard SHIELD uniform, which was loose-fitting and nondescript enough to make it impossible to identify which Avenger he was.

Adam would have had the odds if it were just the men and if he had use of both hands. But with Ruixian and an unknown Avenger in the equation…

And then suddenly, as if responding to to his thoughts, the Avenger drew a gun and aimed a shot at Ruixian's head. The robe swooped in just in time to catch the bullet, which fell to the ground with a sharp _clink_.

"Stay down, Ray," Adam whispered and then added firmly, "Let me handle this."

With a resigned look on her face, she nodded and closed her eyes in acquiescence. She turned her head away from him and quietly rested her cheek on the ground.

"Stand down, mage," the captain said over them.

Adam looked up to the man and bared his teeth. He could taste iron in his mouth and the ground under him was growing warm and wet with his own blood. Spells flared and sputtered across his skin as his magic failed to mitigate the blood loss.

"You are bleeding out, boy," the man continued. "Surrender the mutant or you die here."

"Fuck y-you," Adam said in a drawn out breath.

The Avenger made a sudden move, pivoting on the spot to take Adam with a downward kick of his heel. The robe flew up and snaked around his calf to block the kick and immediately, as though he had expected this, the Avenger rotated himself about his trapped leg to knee Adam's stomach while simultaneously twisting about his spine to sink his right elbow in Adam's chest. The robe extended itself again, wrapping around the Avenger's other leg and his right upper arm before he could break Adam's sternum. And then, finally, the Avenger bent his left arm backwards over his shoulder and aimed the gun over Adam's heart. The robe followed and wrapped itself around the left wrist, angling it just slightly off his torso.

The robe shuddered together with Adam's concentration as it held the Avenger afloat over him, like one of those circus acrobats who suspended themselves in air with lengths of cloth. Adam panted as he concentrated on maintaining the robe in its position, fighting to keep its shape against the Avenger's calculated resistance. He had him trapped; just one more push—one more burst of magic—and he could snap the Avenger in pieces, if his agonized mind could only muster more than the diffuse and unfocused magic it could manage in its pained state and if he weren't so damn afraid of breaking his hold on the Chaos inside him, thrashing to get free.

"Y-you Avengers are so f-fucking _good,_ " Adam said with a huff. He could see the Avenger's masked face just a foot or so over him, sharp eyes still calmly studying the robe's contorted shape. "What a service to the co-community."

That seemed to have hit a nerve. With a soft creak of leather, the Avenger turned his head and, quite accidentally, met Adam's eyes for the first time. There was a strange split-second when Adam felt a disconcerting rush of magic under his skin and the Avenger seemed to stagger in his confinement within Adam's robe, as if he felt the sudden surge of magic too.

Then, an explosion erupted inside Adam's skull.

His hands flew reflexively to his head and he screamed in pain as his grip on his magic finally slipped.

Above him, the robe relaxed around the Avenger, who quickly spun away and landed with a foot on either side of his thrashing body. In a flash, the Avenger turned his guns away and shot six men down. Before the rest knew what was happening, the Avenger had already descended on them and knocked another three out.

All these Adam observed bleary-eyed, in fragments, as the hammering in his head intensified. His body curled into a tight ball as finally, the accumulated debt of magic slammed against him with a force that knocked the breath out of his lungs.

 _Not now, not now_ , he thought through the delirium of skull-splitting agony. He struggled to open his eyes and saw one man collide heavily into two others, as the Avenger landed a solid kick on his chest.

Then another wave of torment racked his body and forced his eyes shut. This time he paid with bones. The splintering began at the tips of his fingers, propagating up his arms and then radiating to the rest of his skeleton. Adam sobbed quietly; every shallow gulp of air with his shattered ribs felt like the stab of a knife.

It took the Avenger less than a minute to take down the sixteen men but to the time-augmented world of mind in anguish, it felt like hours had passed. Chaos magic sang out to him, soothing and tempting with its saccharine siren voice, promising to make everything better: his organs and skin knitted; his bones made whole; and his head relieved of the abominable hammering inside. But Adam knew he couldn't give in, so he coiled tighter into himself and focused on the pain instead.

* * *

At some point, he felt the gentle pressure of a hand pressing on his back and the familiar tingling warmth of Ruixian's powers spreading through his torso. He managed to pry his eyes open and saw her, through a bleary haze of form and color, sitting up. She was sweaty, pale, and shivering, like she was about to pass out, but she forced herself to sit up right.

"Where's the Avenger?" His voice was barely a whisper and sounded so far away. He couldn't feel what she was doing but by the puckered look on her face, he could see that she was struggling, improvising in response to the price that magic was progressively extracting from his body.

"Rounding up the men. Those still alive anyway," she said, closing her eyes to concentrate, eyes that seemed to bulge out of her shrivelled face.

"Why?"

"I don't know. But it's over for now. He seems to be on our side. I won't question it."

Adam started to sit up. "No, I gotta—" He had barely shifted an inch when he suddenly screamed, as splintered bones pierced muscles and his body seized in excruciating pain.

"Stay put!" Ruixian snapped as she gently pressed him down. It was ridiculous to see her—all skin and bone herself—so hostile and assertive but she put some power behind the command and hijacked his nervous system. He tried to open his mouth to protest but even his jaws didn't respond. He could only watch as the Avenger approach them and knelt beside him.

"He can't talk. I'm keeping him still," Ruixian said automatically. Then, as if in afterthought, she pressed another hand on Adam's forehead and another wave spread mercifully through his body, dispelling all physical suffering except for the agony in his skull.

The Avenger leaned over and whispered something to her ear. And to Adam's surprise, Ruixian didn't even flinch.

"All right. But very _very_ carefully. I'm doing my best to keep his heart intact and his ribs from puncturing his lungs but his body is still accumulating injury."

There was a brief exchange between them that Adam couldn't hear and then he was placed on a stretcher and carried into the ship, which had landed stealthily some yards away.

"You're gonna be okay," Ruixian said as soon as the hatched closed and the ship began to climb the sky.

Adam couldn't see much of the plane's interior but he had an awareness that it was small, probably designed to carry only a handful of people for short excursions. There was the sour whiff of dried sweat under the coppery odor of his own blood diffusing in the musty air.

"Where are you taking us?" Ruixian asked. A brief turbulence jostled the plane as it finally breached the stratosphere and the protective shield over the compound. "Are we your prisoners now?"

The Avenger dragged a chair and sat by Adam's head. Then, he took out a syringe from a small white box and passed it to Ruixian, who read the label and passed it back to their captor with a brusque nod. There was a slight pinch in his arm and moments later, a feeling of lightness spread wonderfully through his body. He didn't even think to resist the drug as it smothered him in thick vapors of oblivious rest. He smiled inwardly and floated on the feeling, imagining he could fly again.

His relief only lasted for a few minutes before it turned into dread. Just for a moment, the fog parted slightly and in a brief window of lucidity he remembered where he was and how defenseless his mind had become; he had been stripped bare of all protective spells, including those that had been keeping sleep at bay, and now the drug and the exhaustion of the past month were quickly pulling him under.

He struggled to open his mouth so he could cast the spells but with Ruixian's powers shackling every muscle, he was unable to utter a single word. He watched her eyes, filled with worry and determination, and the Avenger's masked head, looming over him like an omen in the sky, blurring out of focus into meaningless shapes. Chaos swirled excitedly deep in his chest and Adam could have sworn he could _hear_ it laughing.

But he decided he wouldn't despair. Not this time. He had succeeded in saving Ruixian at such a high cost, it _must_ workout; otherwise, it would have all been for nothing. Dante and Oscar. His body. His mind. He had paid so much for this. It _must_ mean something. Chaos magic would not take what he'd paid for with blood and soul. He and Ruixian would escape this Avenger and run away and everything would be back on track. They were too close now to that new life that they had promised each other. He won't fail her now.

 _Hope and fear_ , that's what Loki had said. _Chaos magic feeds on hope and fear._ Adam held on to that thought as everything turned white.

* * *

 _"Billy!"_

 _He woke with a start. Disoriented, he looked around him and tried to remember where he was._

Remember _,_ that's an odd word, _Billy thought to himself._

 _Right, he was at the playground. He rolled his head to one side to work out the kink in his neck and then looked for his brothers._

 _"Billy! Billy! Billy! Billy!" Abel squealed as he raced to the bench where Billy had been playing the dutiful attentive brother before he dozed off. Trailing behind Abel was Seth, with a look of immense concentration on his face as he strove to keep up with his twin._

 _"Did you see? Did you see?" Abel said, bouncing up and down excitedly. "I swung all the way the monkey bars!" he screamed, beaming. He was drenched in sweat, practically dripping, and his outrageously expensive school uniform was covered in dirt and grass stain._

 _"Sure did, squirt," Billy lied. He flinched when he tried—and failed—to dust off the white shirt. His mom would be so mad._ Or even worse, disappointed, _he thought with an internal roll of eyes. "Aw, Abe, I told you to be careful. Mom would flip when she sees this."_

 _"Abe-iz-in-troooouuubbble," Seth said in a sing-song voice._

 _Abel tackled him with a battle cry and the two kids piled in a heap of limbs, toppling over each other on the grass as they wrestled with each other._

 _"Need help?" The blond boy took the space to his right and passed him his milkshake._

 _"Nah, the damage is done so let's just let them tire themselves out." He took a sip and made a face. "Strawberry. Yuck"_

 _The boy nodded and then said, "You're crazy, Kaplan. Strawberry's the best." The boy took the cup from his hand and took a sip, staring deeply into Billy's eyes. "Ahhh, strawberry," he said with relish, closing his eyes and throwing his head back with a sigh. "Ahhh…"_

 _Billy punched his shoulder playfully and took back the cup. With an exaggerated wrinkling of his nose, he took a daring gulp and made choking sounds. "Yuck!" he said again. They laughed and turned back to the boys rolling in the dirt._

 _"Have you told them yet?" the other boy asked with too conversational a tone, like he wasn't too invested in the answer._

 _Wasn't that just adorable? Billy smiled as he considered his response. He was aware of the boy's eyes on his face and the knowledge filled his stomach with butterflies. Still smiling to himself, he watched Seth get the advantage, pinning Abel to the ground by sitting on his chest. A passing mother frowned at their roughhousing and shot Billy a judging glare._

 _"No, I haven't," he finally_ _said as Seth wrapped his hands around his brother's throat. Abel made dramatic choking sounds, complete with flailing legs, and clawed desperately at Seth's arms and face. "Easy on your brother, Seth."_

 _With a final mighty thrust of his fist to the sky, Abel perished a heroic death. "Oh, cruel gods!" he cried out as his eyes closed, tongue sticking out of the corner of his mouth as his head lolled to one side._

 _And with that epic struggle finally concluded, Billy turned back to the boy beside him and grinned. "How about you? Told your mom yet?"_

 _"Nope," the boy said, popping his lips. He stared deeply into Billy's eyes and sucked a loud slurping gulp from his milkshake. Billy snorted and laughed again._

 _"I remember this one," another voice said from his left. Deeper and older, as if the years had weighed it down. "I learned something important about you."_

 _Only when he turned to look, it was the same boy_ _watching him, bright and golden and—_

 _His body stiffened. Something clicked in his brain and he turned back to his right and saw that the blood boy had gone back to watching his brothers, who were shrieking as they chased each other around the swings._

 _Billy stood up and looked around him. Manhattan. An early October afternoon, bright and sunny. Overhead, a flock of birds flew in a V-formation, migrating south or north. The memory was from almost ten years ago._

 _"Yeah, me too," he said carefully, eyebrows pulling into a frown. "But it didn't happen like this. The boy…_ you _weren't there."_

 _"I suppose I wasn't," the man said. "But I was, the first time it happened."_

 _"Don't—Stop with the riddles. I hate it."_

 _The man smiled and tipped his head up to watch the plodding clouds. "I know you do."_

 _"You are made of me," Billy said. "That's what you said. And for some reason I feel inclined to trust you. I think I know what you mean."_

 _"You do?"_

 _"You're my conscience, aren't you?"_

 _The man rolled his eyes toward Billy and snorted. "Sometimes, I guess."_

 _"Erm… The anthropomorphic manifestation of my magic?"_

 _"So close," the man said, smirking as he turned his body to fully face Billy. His head tilted to one side. "But no dice. Try again, Wiccan."_

 _"What? I'm actually Jewish. I mean I'm not very good at it but they haven't kicked me out yet."_

 _"Huh?"_

 _"I'm not wiccan. I'm Jewish."_

 _"Oh, you're still Asgardian," the man said. He said it with an amused smile, like he was trying not to laugh at a joke that Billy wouldn't get. "I guess that makes sense. Things would have happened differently."_

 _Billy frowned as he tried to divine the meaning behind that and, failing, shook his head. "No more riddles and poetically creepy one-liners. Who are you?"_

 _"I'm…" the man said hesitantly, biting his lip as if unsure of the answer himself. Then, a long moment later, he nodded to himself. Resolute and decided, he said confidently, "I'm Teddy. Teddy Altman." He twitched his eyebrows toward the other boy on the bench. They looked identical, except the man was broader and taller. And a little weathered too. But the face was the same bright sun._

Whoa, easy. Pretty boy might still eat your face, _Billy_ _thought to himself, and then, with an internal shrug, decided that there were worse things than having his face eaten by this guy._

 _"Okay,_ Teddy _," Billy said with an emphasis._

 _Huh. It was so pedestrian and unexpected and now that he had the name, he knew that it couldn't have been anything else. "Teh-dee," he said again, slowly as if to relish each wisp of tender syllable through his breath. The name felt good on his tongue, like it had always belonged in his mouth._

 _His eyes widened at the thought._ Wow, okay, Kaplan. What the hell was that? _he thought suddenly, feeling like someone had splashed cold water on his face._

 _He took a quick sip of his milkshake. Strawberry. He forgot. So disgusting. "That's a human name," he said as he ran his hand along the metal arm of the bench. It was solid to the touch. Was he dreaming again? "_ Are _you? Human, I mean?"_

 _"No, but I was raised human," Teddy said. He took Billy's milkshake and sipped. He held Billy's gaze as he swallowed, exuding the same intensity as the other boy did just now. As if this somehow proved a point. Like drinking the milkshake would mean that he's human? "Grew up right here in New York."_

 _"And now you're inside me," Billy said. He immediately regretted the phrasing when both their eyes grew wide and their faces turned a deep scarlet. "I mean now you're in my head."_

 _"Yes. Right. Of course," Teddy stammered and choked as he took another slurp of Billy's milkshake. He passed it back and turned away, whistling as if that could shake away the embarrassment, and then added, "No, I wasn't always here." He cleared his throat and thrust his right hand out to Billy. But he kept his head turned away._

 _For a long moment, Billy stared dumbly at the offered hand and then, not knowing what he was expected to do with it, proceeded to very mechanically execute the world's most awkward handshake._

 _If Teddy noticed, he didn't show it. Instead, he twisted their hands up so that only their palms were touching, as if joined in prayer. "You feel that?" Teddy said as he pressed against Billy._

 _Billy blushed deeper and took refuge in his milkshake again, all too aware of the tremulous touch between their hands, the warmth of Teddy's palm, and the rough feel of skin on skin._

Palm to palm in holy palmers' kiss, _his intruding brain supplied again._ Holy fucking shit, Kaplan. Calm the fuck down.

 _Billy glanced about them, worried for a second that someone could be misinterpreting whatever it was that was happening between him and this man who called himself Teddy. This was his area and there were people who knew him here. What would they think if they saw him pressing hands with this strange man under the full glare of broad daylight?_

 _Then, with a feeling that was both relief and remorse, he remembered that it was just a memory... nothing real._

 _"Um…" Teddy slowly spread his fingers and interlaced them with Billy's. His hand was so warm. And the hairs on Billy's arms stood on end as Teddy's fingers brushed down his. "How about now? Feel anything?"_

 _"Feel what?" Billy said with a forced laugh. "Violated? Hey, man, Teddy, man, I don't usually let strange men hold my hand unless they buy me dinner first."_

Buy me dinner first? Well done, Billy. Come on!

 _Teddy turned to him and wrinkled his nose. "You let them cup your face, though?"_

 _"Only when they're ridiculously cute," Billy said thoughtlessly in another try at being facetious. Mortified, he turned back to his milkshake and almost choked when he swallowed._

 _"I don't know, man, Billy, man," Teddy raised an amused eyebrow. His eyes were_ laughing. _"You looked pretty comfortable."_

Is he—is he _flirting_?

 _"I was taken by surprise," Billy deadpanned._

 _"You were rubbing your face on my hand."_

 _"That was… um…_ shit. _"_

 _"And your eyes were closed."_

 _"Hey, crater of death and destruction under a black infinite void of doom. Very romantic stuff. I was caught in the moment, all right?" Billy said in a last-ditch attempt to be glib._

 _"You were_ mewling _."_

 _"I was NOT!" Billy said hotly, finally losing all pretense of composure and flushing so deeply that he was sure his facial arteries were on the brink of bursting. "Wow. Theodore Rufus Altman, you are a certified ass."_

 _Teddy froze, as if he were stunned, and then suddenly burst out in laughter, his eyes crinkling happily and his whole body shaking so vigorously that his joy seemed to ripple to the very space around him. He was smiling, and that warmed Billy somehow, and his smile was so bright it almost hurt to look. He took the milkshake back and sipped. "Theodore Rufus Altman?"_

 _"It felt necessary to use your whole stupid name," Billy said petulantly and with as much haughtiness he could manage in his humiliated state._

 _What was he doing? Why was he flirting back? And why did it feel so natural, like they'd done this a thousand times before?_

 _"Oh, it's necessary, is it?" Teddy retorted in a mocking tone._

 _"To formally declare that you are an absolute jerk."_

Freaking smooth, Kaplan. So freaking smooth.

 _"Thanks."_

 _"There should be a certificate. Signed and everything."_

Oh no, stop! You stop now, Billy Kaplan, you're spiralling!

 _"Sure," Teddy said, still grinning. "But I didn't tell you my whole name, did I?"_

 _"'Course, you did!"_

 _"Nope," he said triumphantly, popping his lips again._

Theodore Rufus Altman _. Where did Billy get that? It just came to him in the spur of the moment._ Huh. _He curled his fingers downwards so they were practically holding hands now. Around them, the memory from ten years ago played out like a film. A gust of wind blew around them, kicking up leaves and lifting their hair._

 _"It just… It came to me. Did I—Do I know you, Teddy? From before um here?"_

 _Teddy grin faded to a smaller smile. "Yeah," he said._

 _"Billy! Billy!" Seth screamed as Abel caught him in a headlock. "Billyyyyyyyyyy!" Billy ignored him._

 _"Were we friends?"_

 _Teddy nodded again, looking brighter and happier._

 _"Were we…?" Billy couldn't finish the thought so he squeezed Teddy's hand instead._

 _Teddy stared at him intently, brimming with such sad joy that his eyes almost shined. His lips parted as if to say something but then he thought better of it and shook his head, still with that stupid patient smile on his stupid perfect face. He made no reply except to withdraw his hand with an ease that didn't surprise Billy._

 _"Teddy," Billy said as another truth made itself known. "Are you an Avenger?"_

* * *

"I am," a voice was saying. "Or was. I'm not sure anymore."

"How do I know that you're telling the truth?" another replied.

"Well, I guess we just have to wait for him to wake up, don't we?"

Adam tried to focus on the voices. They were familiar but he couldn't place them in his memory. Their words slipped over each other, obscuring meaning, and it was difficult to follow most of the conversation.

"How long was I there?" he heard the second voice ask.

"A little over a month," the first one replied.

"Oh. It felt a lot longer."

A short pause, filled only by the intermittent beeping of a machine. Adam could feel the scratchy cotton sheet laid over him and that uncomfortable weight of a large needle in his arm. There was the salty smell of food in the air, which made him want to retch.

"He's pretty banged up but he'll be all right," the second voice—Ruixian, _yes!_ he remembered—said confidently

"He's a good fighter, Ruixian. A supremely powerful mage. But at the end of the day, he's still just human," the other one said cautiously. "He may not be strong enough."

"Maybe not," Ruixian said confidently. "But I am."

A rustling of cloth as someone to his side shifted in their seat. Then, Adam felt a hand over his head and the intrusion of a weak electric field through his skull, so very carefully probing his brain. It touched and prodded against his brainwaves, skirting with feather-light fingers so delicate as if the slightest slip would shatter him.

"Oh! He's awake!" exclaimed Ruixian, getting on her feet.

Adam confirmed the fact with a weak groan. "Oh my God," he moaned. "I'm dying."

"You are, asshole," Ruixian said as she placed her other hand over his chest. His belly tingled as the cells of his body responded to the manipulations of her powers. "I couldn't heal you properly while you were asleep."

"Why not?"

"Your powers were resisting me."

He tried to rub his temples but he couldn't get his hand to move an inch. He stared at it absently for a few seconds and turned back to Ruixian. "How long was I out?"

"Three days. You're in the ICU. Well, _an_ ICU. Sort of. You know what, I think _I'm_ the ICU."

"Damn."

"Yeah. Organs failing. Massive internal bleeding. And your body's not done fucking up. Last night, your bladder _disappeared_. You know how hard it is to regenerate an _entire fucking bladder_? And with your powers constantly fighting mine? Holy shit, Adam, how much magic did you use?"

 _Did he? Use so much magic an organ would outright disappear?_ He tried to think, but the gears in his mind refused to turn. _Where was he after Madripoor?_

"Thank you," he said, in the absence of a better answer.

"Don't thank me. You still might die just yet." She said it with determination in her voice and a hardness in her eyes. "And I will never forgive you, if you do. So, here. Drink."

She held a glass of water to his lips and he drank it hungrily, drinking so passionately he was practically making out with the glass. He closed his eyes and moaned as the cool liquid flowed down his parched throat. When he was done, feeling slightly restored, he opened his eyes and studied her.

Ruixian had a wild disheveled look, like she had hastily tried to grow out her hair and, in her haste, it came out in uneven patches. her eyes had a tired dullness to them but her intensity, so incongruous to her diminutive form, had returned in full force and Adam was glad for that. He gave her a look over from waist to head and saw that she had regained most of her weight back. "How do you feel?"

"Like a pig. I ate non-stop for a day. Not even exaggerating."

"Good," Adam said with some relief as he closed his eyes. "That's good."

She glared at him for a long second, clearly unhappy that he wasn't exuding the appropriate amount of worry for himself. "I'm fine. Let's focus on you for now."

"Okay, boss," he said with a smile.

"So," she said and then paused for a long moment.

Adam opened an eye and found her eyebrows pulled into a tight frown.

"So what?"

Her brown eyes shifted to her hands and she asked in a tightly controlled voice, "Dante and Oscar?"

For a while, he stared back at her in confusion and almost said "At home?" with a frown of his own. Then something pushed through the murky inchoate thoughts that clogged his mind and he remembered. A string of images and impressions, emanating from the center of his brain and rippling painfully through the sore tissue as it crystallized into memory. _The flight from Madripoor, yes, that was how it started_.

The spirit of the mountain's death, summoned at a price.

"With the spirits," he said, too muddled to realize how that must have sounded to her.

Ruixian's lips curled downward to a pout and she was quiet again.

"I'm glad you're okay," Adam said a few minutes later, perplexed by her sudden change in mood.

"Yeah," she said as she moved her hand over to the other side of his chest. "Now it's your turn to get fixed up."

"All right, but do my hands first. Where are we? I need to—"

Ruixian glared at him and flicked his forehead. "No fucking way, shitface. Hold still so I can patch you up."

"But—"

"Let me heal you first."

"But—"

"Or would you prefer that I try my hand at resurrection?"

" _Ugh._ All right, you win," Adam said with a huff. "Thanks, Ray. You saved my life."

She made three quick taps on his chest and tilted her head to the left. She had a serious look on her face

The Avenger was in a chair by the foot of his bed, watching the exchange with attentive eyes. He had his mask drawn halfway up his face, as he ate something from the plastic box in his hands. As soon as Adam's eyes met his, the soft echo of magic reverberated through his bones, thankfully only mildly uncomfortable this time. The Avenger shivered slightly, as if he felt that surge too, and carefully placed his unfinished lunch (dinner? There were no windows in the room; Adam couldn't tell the time.) on the cardiac table in front of him. He folded his arms over his chest and leaned back, his lips assuming a displeased downward curve. And then, with a deep-suffering sigh of his own, he reached out to one side of his neck and pulled a zipper.

"You have a lot of explaining to do, Adam," the Avenger said as she tossed her mask onto his chest.

His head throbbed at the onslaught of distant memory breaking through the hold of his spell. Too fast for his damaged brain to handle at once. "Ah, _fuck,_ what luck we had," he said, wincing as he stared at her in disbelief. He started laughing hysterically—but only for a very short while; the sudden movement shook his ribs, eliciting a sharp stabbing in his sides. Ruixian stared at him like he'd lost his mind.

"So much luck." The Avenger took off a glove and threw it right at his face. Perfect aim. "Explain. Now."

" _Ow._ All right, all right," he said. "I'm so sorry, Kate. I had no choice. I—"

She threw the other glove and hit him right in the eye.

" _Ow, fuck._ What the hell was _that_ for?!"

"Sorry, couldn't help it. But you deserve it. I'm really mad right now."

"Look. I'm sorry but I had no choice, ok—"

"The next time you say that you had no choice, I'll throw my boot," she said in an even tone. "You know me, _Adam_ ; I do not skimp on shoes. These ones are very hard and very heavy."

"All right. I get it, okay? You're mad and you have every reason to be."

"Glad you know it," she said, crossing her arms over her chest again. "What were you thinking?"

"I don't know. I hardly remember anything right now. My head hurts."

It was true. He knew that his name was Adam—and that it wasn't—and that he was running with Ruixian. But other than that, the rest was a blur—not completely lost, but under a thick haze that dulled remembrance. Like someone had gathered his memories into photographs and spilled coffee all over them.

The ordeal of paying one's debt to magic was not only excruciating but also unpredictable and discombobulating (yes, that was the first word that came to his mind), often determining costs with some form of cosmic irony—like amnesia from one who had meddled with spells of forgetting—and then exacting them at the most inopportune moments, often to disastrous results. He wouldn't be surprised to find some memories to be lost permanently. Such was the price of magic, of cheating the universe, and breaking its laws.

"Try _very_ hard," Kate said through gritted teeth. "Or I'll help you remember."

She didn't mean that; that was just the way she talked. Adam remembered that much. He took a deep breath and let a few seconds pass before he answered. "It was the Avengers, all right?" he said, feeling a little ashamed. "They wanted me dead."

"Why?" she asked without a drop of empathy.

Adam tipped his head up and looked her right in the eye. "Because the last time a Chaos mage walked the earth, she committed genocide."

Kate stared him down for a long time, cold sharp eyes fixed on his face. Around them, the machines beeped and Ruixian worked on him, resolutely ignoring their exchange. When Kate finally replied, her voice was hard as stone. "I don't believe you."

Adam closed his eyes and shook his head. "You have no idea what they're capable of."

"I don't?" she said more to herself than to him. "I wasn't sure I should take you with me from that roof, you know? I mean after the Winter Soldier and the Jack of Hearts thing, it was a little stupid of me to just trust you off the bat. Especially since you messed with my head.

"But it's you, Adam. You were there with me in the beginning. So..." She shook her head and smiled a little. "Let's fight another time. I'm glad you're alive, I really am. And I'm even gladder I didn't kill you in Mauritius. Would have been awkward, like Greek tragedy level of awkward. Tell me about the past four years. I remember up to Mother."

"You're all right for now," Ruixian said suddenly, sitting up. "I've fixed up your vital organs so I'm reasonably sure you won't die within the hour. Congratulations, you have two functioning kidneys again. But I need to rest for a few minutes."

"Yeah, please. Do that."

"And I think you two need some catching up," Ruixian said, turning to Kate and giving her a nod.

"Thanks, Ray," Adam smiled up at her.

She nodded at him and smirked. "Whatever, loser. I'll be back in a bit. Let's get you more water."

She kissed him on the forehead and stood up to leave.

"Actually," he called out to her just as she reached the door. "I'd like a milkshake."

"I'll see what I can do," she said reluctantly. "Vanilla?"

"Nope," he said with a popping sound of his lips. "Strawberry."

* * *

Life in Kate's safe house was not so much a buzz as it was a low steady hum (and also quite a literal _thrum._ The building shook about every half-hour whenever a train passed by overhead or so Kate had explained; Adam suspected some nefarious activity going on in her hideout instead). Aside from her, Ruixian, and Adam, there were only about a dozen or so other people in the facility but all areas of life were conducted in a clockwork routine—meals, showers, training, bed time—broken only very rarely by briefings, missions, and debriefings. Kate referred to the place as the _Roost_ , which was apt for the Avenger Hawkeye but ironic because it was buried deep underground, a small base hidden in a Moldovan city whose name Kate had instructed her minions not to divulge to Adam or Ruixian. It was cold and stark and everything, including the people's clothes and faces even, was in muted tones of gray.

The first few weeks were hard on Adam. The destruction that his body suffered was far greater than he had expected and was more extensive than Ruixian could handle in a few seatings. His days were spent hooked up to morphine, which dulled the pain but exacerbated the fog of confusion that seemed to have since sedimented and calcified around his brain, so he had plenty of time to read books or, when the words began to blur and merge, to watch Moldovan drama. He couldn't understand a word, of course, but the constant shift of shapes and colors amused him well enough to keep him stimulated.

Except for a few hours in the morning when she came to work on his injuries, he rarely saw Ruixian. Though still recovering herself (admittedly at a startling pace; five years after her rescue, she had regained all but ten pounds of her original weight—though Adam suspected she conspired to keep it that way), she assimilated readily into the Roost's monotony and, consequentially, was swallowed in its iron system of schedules and protocols, which afforded her little time with Adam outside his treatment hours. Even her meals she elected to spend in the canteen with the other inhabitants of the Roost.

But what alarmed Adam most about this particular arrangement, to an increasing degree each day, was the utter defenselessness of his condition. He was completely at other people's mercy. Kate's mercy. An _Avenger's_ mercy. He was too addlebrained to focus on anything for more than a few seconds, much less to gather the willpower necessary to cast a spell or to generate even a pathetic little spark (once, he thought that he had succeeded in producing a small current from his finger but it turned out to only be static from the sheets). And in his utter inability to take care of himself, people fussed over him night and day. He could never quite remember their faces no matter how hard he tried. And even as that heavy cloying fog lifted sluggishly from his mind, it was only replaced by a growing awareness of his helplessness in this incapacitated state.

And still, above all, the thing that infuriated him most was the fact that everyone treated him like he would break at the slightest misstep. Even in his disconcertion, it was clear that there was something big happening that everyone—Ruixian included—was keeping from him. Agitated voices suddenly hushing when they realised he was lucid enough to pay attention... Hard faces that smiled patiently but otherwise looked distracted even as he talked to them... One time, the boy who brought his lunch suddenly burst into tears when Adam asked if there had been any news on the mutant resettlement of Genosha. He asked Ruixian about it but Kate gave her a quick look and she only said, "When you're better."

Memory returned to him slowly and selectively. Big things at first: the fight… Arayat… his long exile in Madripoor… and the spell of forgetting that had created Adam Thorne. The details came even more slowly, very painfully, and almost sparingly; he wouldn't be surprised if some minutiae of his life never came back at all. What was the name of that bakery he loved in Madripoor? The name of that almost-cute prata maker he fancied in the food center in Vineyard Road? The spirit, whose name he couldn't remember, had told him something important, he was sure but for the life of him, he couldn't even remember how she looked like now. At some point, when the nurse lifted his shirt, Adam was surprised to find a mole an inch above his belly button.

Soon, in his loneliness and feebleness, he became restless and miserable. But for Ruixian's sake, who seemed to have fit in happily enough in the machinery of the Roost, he tried his best to force a smile and to laugh at her boisterous attempts to take his mind off his injuries.

It would have taken him months if not years—or ever at all—to recover—or to simply _not die_ —if it hadn't been for Ruixian's ministrations. He never fully understood how she did what she did with powers that were nearly identical to his; ' _Cells communicate through the proteins on their membranes, often with charges or through hydrophobic interactions'_ and something about _'pluripotent stem cells and synapses'_ , she had tried to explain to him a few times but even if he understood all that jargon, he doubted he could ever pull off the same trick as he simply lacked the surgical precision with which she wielded her electrokinesis.

Progress was slow and extremely painful for both of them, since Adam's own electrokinetic powers would sometimes react and lash out at hers. But slowly, she was able to fix him up, organs first, then bones, muscles, nerves, but only very flimsily; she admitted that it had always been challenging to consciously guide the cells of other people, as opposed to the reflexive way her powers controlled hers. Even with her aid, Adam was yet to regain full control of his hands and legs, making him dependent on the people around him for just about every activity including, embarrassingly enough, most bodily functions. And having a catheter shoved up his dick certainly did not improve his mood.

And, perhaps, most importantly, he couldn't cast the spells that protected him from sleep, which had become an even greater temptation in his recovery. He fought hard at first, staying awake for up to three days at a stretch before sheer exhaustion overwhelmed willpower, caffeine, and the occasional adrenaline surge from a reluctant Ruixian. It always happened gradually, the slip from waking to sleeping, characterized by a blurring of thoughts and an altered state of consciousness that could have been so easily misattributed to the formidable meditation skills of a Formally trained mage.

Then he'd wake up some hours later, panting and drenched in cold sweat, with a terror that took some few minutes of deep breathing and wheedling from the nurse to calm down. But nothing ever happened. No metadimensional parasite trying to eat his face or a demon king prophesied to herald ten thousand years of living darkness or something; he had not succumbed to Chaos. The sun rose and sank and the world and the stars kept spinning. Nothing but quiet sleep and dreams of a man who looked a lot like Ted, the nurse. Dreams which—like mists dissipating at the warm touch of dawn—he never remembered.

* * *

"What's all this?" he asked Kate one day when she picked him up from his room for a walk.

"Hmm?" Kate asked absent-mindedly as she and Ruixian lifted him from the bed and deposited him in the chair. "What's all what?"

Even though she was still warming up to him, Adam always felt safer and more at ease when she was around, perhaps because she had been— _was_ … or at the very least, _could_ again _be_ —his friend; every time she had to leave on a mission, she would assign three random men to guard Adam but they carried out their duties with such cold and impersonal proficiency that he soon started feeling like he was something unwelcome that had to be tolerated.

"This." Adam lifted a hand and made circular gesture with his wrist, unresponsive fingers limp and lifeless on his knuckles.

"Oh. Just a bunch of people I've picked up along the way. I guess it's sort of become a project. You're not the only one who picks up strays, you know," Kate said as she turned to wink at Ruixian, who responded by wrinkling her nose.

"What kind of project?" Ruixian asked as they stepped out into the hallway. "You're not plotting world domination here are you?"

"From a basement?"

"I don't know Kate," Adam said. Just then, a group of women walked past them, all in gray jumpsuits and with holsters bulging discreetly at their sides. "Super secret underground base crawling with minions and housing advanced tech. Smells pretty villainous to me."

Kate laughed above him as she pushed him past the canteen doors and toward the end of the corridor. "How do you know I've got advanced tech down here?"

"No way you're using up this much electricity just to power an Avenger safe house," Ruixian said.

Kate pressed her face against a retina scanner and led them through the steel doors. "You're right. Call it naiveté or sentimentality but I never meant to keep it a secret from you two. Even from you, Ruixian. I just needed Adam to be a little more functional before we start discussing strategy."

"I'm not all that recovered to be honest. My head's still a little out of it," Adam said. "And _strategy_? We aren't staying, Kate. We'll be out of your hair once I'm well enough to leave."

Kate rolled him in front of a large steel table in what looked like a war room and gestured for Ruixian to take the seat to his right. It was a small room, austere and gray like everything else in the Roost, and could barely hold the table and the dozen high-backed chairs surrounding it. There were no windows, not even on the door, which Adam noticed had no knob or anything that could be used to pry it open, and the walls were just the same gray metal except for the one facing Adam and Ruixian, which was, instead, made entirely black glass.

"I need your help, Asgardian," Kate said as she stalked to the other side of the table. Her demeanor had change, her posture suddenly erect and each movement deliberate and purposeful. She was no longer Kate Bishop, who had been Adam's friend; she was Hawkeye now, Avenger, SHIELD Agent... "And yours too," she added, turning to Ruxian with a solemn look on her face. She paused and frowned, as if something important just crossed her mind. "Uh... Ruixian."

 _She wants to name her_ , Adam thought suddenly. _She means. to make her one of us._

"No way," he said immediately, with us much fervor he could manage. He'd have slammed his fist on the table if he were able to. "I'm out. And don't bring her into this."

"But first, let me apologize to you, Ruixian," Hawkeye went on as she sat down opposite them, carefully placing her hands on the edge of the table. "It was my SHIELD men who were after Adam back in Madripoor so it's my fault that you got caught in the crossfire."

"You also tried to shoot me in the face."

"To be fair, that was a tranq."

Ruixian folded her hands and gingerly set them on the table. Her eyes dropped and she studied them intently, as if they held the words that she was looking for. "You didn't know what they'd do to me," she said without looking up. "That wasn't your fault."

Hawkeye shook her head. "I'm afraid that's not entirely correct. True, I didn't know even that there was a SHIELD facility in Mauritius. And when I found out where they were sending you, I was too blinded by my loyalty to SHIELD to suspect that they were performing human experiments. The truth is, I have been receiving disturbing reports for a while now. Suspicious activities from detention facilities all over the world. Funds disappearing. Secret rooms. Shady deals between governments. HYDRA. AIM. This thing goes in deep. And at some point, there was just too much information to form a pattern. Too much noise. But I never imagined SHIELD would have a hand in this." She paused for a while and stared at Ruixian. There was a change in her voice when she continued. "I shouldn't have surrendered you to them and I am _so so_ sorry for that. If it weren't for me, you wouldn't have gone through what you did."

Ruixian grimaced as she opened her mouth—no doubt to reassure Hawkeye again that it wasn't her fault—but Adam beat her to it.

"Damn right!" he exploded, with a sudden pang in his head. "If it weren't for her powers, she wouldn't have recovered from that! Do you know what it's like to be split open so people can poke around inside? Alive and _conscious?_ Because I do, Kate. You don't come out whole from something like that!"

The room was quiet for a while, with only Adam's heavy breathing and the barely audible hum of something happening on the other end of Hawkeye's earpiece.

"Adam," Ruixian said, turning to him with a small smile. "It's okay. It really wasn't her fault. She's just trying to save the world. Like you used to. Like you still want to."

"I don't know about that," Kate said before Adam could respond. "But I've made it my personal mission to get to the bottom of this. If there's an infestation in SHIELD…"

 _Infestation_. The word jogged something in Adam's mind. Something someone had said to him recently. But as usual, the miasma that clogged his brain choked the thought before it could blossom into memory.

"You said your _spies_. Is this what this whole place is?" he asked, keeping his voice level and calm. "Are you starting your own spy organization, Kate?"

"No," she said firmly and without hesitation. "This Roost is just a sanctuary for people with nowhere to go. I'm not their boss and they could do whatever they want." She paused, as if considering, before adding, "But they help me out here and then—don't give me that look, Adam, it's only _if_ they want to! I don't force them to do anything. I don't even _ask_!"

"So what, they're volunteers? Don't think I've noticed, Hawkeye. They all look _really_ young."

She glared at him ineffectively, pressed something on her earpiece, and then turned back to Ruixian. "It was one of the men here who discovered that the Mauritian facility were operating on mutants. Off the books."

" _Was_?" Ruixian asked.

"We blew it up just a minute ago."

* * *

Adam and Ruixian stared in stunned silence. Behind Hawkeye, the black screen flickered to life to show the wreckage of a burning building.

It took a few moments for the image to penetrate the stupor clouding his thoughts and once it did, Adam felt a surge of panic. This was Hawkeye, he had to remind himself that; she might have been a friend once but she was still an Avenger. He and Ray... they had to get out.

"Well done, Hawkeye," he said glibly, to hide the mounting fear. "I'd clap if I could. Avenger. SHIELD agent. And now, terrorist."

The truth was that she terrified him sometimes. It was easy for people to underestimate her—human, young, female—and the moment they did, they'd already lost. There was a reason she had been the _de facto_ leader of their old team, and not just because she was the money. Her combat and sharpshooter skills were formidable, true enough, but that wasn't what made her so dangerous. It was her tactical mind in the end, in the way she could swiftly and decisively get things done with devastating competence. Of course in the old days, she put that brain of hers to use in subduing criminals, dismantling drug cartels, or taking down her father's empire. But now to see it put to use like this... running her own underground intelligence agency... spying on SHIELD itself... _blowing up government buildings_. Adam was for once in his life, truly and completely afraid of her.

He wondered briefly if, like her money, she had inherited that same capacity for violence from her father, and just as quickly he smothered the thought before his flippant mouth decided to make the suggestion public.

"We located a total of eight such facilities and coordinated a simultaneous attack," she said in a calm and collected voice, almost on auto-pilot as if she had not just committed acts of war against multiple countries. The conflagration onscreen shrank and seven other images popped up side by side, showing the same fiery devastation. "Like I've said, there were too many fingerprints on this thing: government officials, HYDRA, AIM, even leaders of mutant organizations and members of the inhuman monarchy. Finding out that SHIELD was behind Mauritius was the last straw. It was getting too messy and it was clear that more sleuthing would just bury us in more contradictory evidence. So I initiated Project Nero."

"What happened to the mutants?" Ruixian asked.

Hawkeye shook her head sombrely, breaking her stoic façade for a moment. "Last night, we relocated those we could to Genosha. I didn't expect there to be so few survivors in just one day. Five percent of our projections."

"Most mutants were processed and disposed within a few days of arrival," Ruixian said. "At least that was how it felt like; it was very difficult to tell time when you're in the dark all the time. They wouldn't keep you around unless you're interesting. Most mutants aren't."

"Ninety-seven survivors from all eight facilities." Hawkeye closed her eyes and slowly shook her head. "We expected over two thousand. _God_."

She took a deep breath before turning back to Adam. "Which brings me to why I was after you in the first place, _Adam Thorne_." She reached under table and retrieved an object.

Adam recognized it immediately as it slid across the table. "How did—"

"Like I said, Adam, I need your help," she said. "We tried to open this, of course, but it has been spelled. Very good job, by the way. A SHIELD mage lost a hand trying."

Adam frowned at that. It had been pristine when Jacob had given it to him and he hadn't spelled it after either; there was nothing all that important inside that would have necessitated that, nothing that could be connected back to him. He ran a finger along an edge of the box, its cold surface gleaming under the fluorescent light, and felt the barbed touch of magic pervading the metal. Hawkeye was right; it was powerful magic. More than that, it was _familiar_. An image bubbled painfully to the front of his mind: the woman mage in Mauritius—the one who killed her brother to save him. He wondered if there was another mage in SHIELD, protecting him for some reason. His head throbbed as he attempted to draw out the memory.

"Of course, I didn't know that I was after you," Hawkeye continued, breaking the grip of memory. "I mean I didn't even remember you until Mauritius. As it turned out, I was looking for someone else."

"Who?" Ruixian asked with a frown. "Jacob?"

Hawkeye shook her head. "You must understand… this safe house is just a side project. I'm still an Avenger and an agent of SHIELD for most days of the week. Before Project Nero, I was working a job for the Avengers. A string of murders all over the world."

"Seems a little beneath the Avengers," quipped Adam.

"I thought so too, at first. In fact, in the beginning it was just one murder. An infant, Edmund Rothschild."

Ruixian suddenly sat up straight. "I'm sorry, did you say _Rothschild_? Wealthiest-family-in-the-world Rothschild? Conspiracy-theory Rothschild? That Rothschild?"

Hawkeye nodded and Adam added, "More than that, the Rothschilds are an ancient line of mystics. And not just mystics either. Mages. Very old blood."

"The oldest. First of the First Seven, to be exact," Hawkeye said. "That's about as high profile as you could get in the mystical community so of course the Avengers were interested. My father had personal connections with a minor branch of the family so I was the natural choice. The child was poisoned, Adam, and during the course of my investigation, I discovered other deaths amongst the ranks of the Seven. In _every_ family. Mostly children. All poisoned."

The images on the screen changed to photographs of people and buildings distributed around the globe. Adam recognized some of the names. CEOs, world leaders, some celebrities, Kim Jong Un, the Pope.

"The Seven have their fingers behind every major force in the global economy. Politics, media, finance, RnD—you name it. Naturally, like all _other_ world order societies, they go through extreme lengths to preserve their anonymity. But the Seven are also the most powerful mystics on this planet. Might even give Adam here a run for his money on a good day. That kind of physical—no, _mystical_ —power is difficult to hide. And of course, it's much harder to hide from other mystics since the high court of mystics has very strict laws against the use of magic on other mystics, what with their already very small population. And let's not forget the taboo against memory magic, which, surprisingly, supersedes necromancy on _Vetitum Magicae_ —"this last part she said while staring intently at Adam"—so even if the identities of the families remained hidden, the fact of the existence of the First Seven remained known to the magical community.

"And now there is someone powerful enough to hunt down magical royalty. Naturally, no one's very forthcoming with their genealogies so you can imagine how difficult it is for me to catch this... this… witch hunter. Not to mention the Seven actively destroys all evidence of the murders to protect the identities of other members. But since I'm really good at my job, I managed to figure out that Darlene Ayala was a child of the Seven. Well sort of. Her dad was a member of the Seven but she did not inherit the gift. She was thirty-three when the witch hunter found her, youngest of her line but older than most of the other victims. I got to her just in time to see him slit her throat."

Hawkeye looked from each face to the next, clearly waiting for someone to say something.

"And I saw his face," she said, steepling her fingers and resting her elbows on the table.

Another long moment passed as she let her words sink in.

"Well, are you gonna share or are you gonna keep us in suspense?" Adam asked. He didn't follow most of what they'd been talking about, only the gist of it: that someone was hunting the Seven and that she'd seen his face; all else were details that slipped through his mind.

Hawkeye retrieved another object from under the table and slid it across to Adam and Ruixian. It was a photograph: an out of focus image of silver and green streaks, as if the camera had suddenly moved. Adam stared at it for a long time, his head throbbing as he tried to make sense of the picture before him. And when finally it did, he realised that it was a face, a fuzzy but _very familiar_ face. He might have jumped to his feet if he could. Beside him, Ruixian gasped out loud.

"The face I saw was yours, Adam Thorne."

Ruixian turned to him, wide-eyed and mouth agape. "And the plot thickens."

* * *

"You're joking, right?" Adam scoffed, wanting to fold his arms for emphasis.

"Well, the hair was silver. That's why I was looking for you in Madripoor." She held out another piece of paper, this one a perfect sketch of his face, though the hair suggested a lighter color than his own brown. "I only caught a glimpse so I think I deserve some credit for my fearsome artistic skills."

Adam was unimpressed. "If you saw _my_ face, that would have broken the spell's hold on you and you would have remembered me," he said.

"Which then leads us to one logical conclusion," Hawkeye said, standing up.

"Time travel?" Adam asked at the same moment Ruixian excitedly suggested, "Clones?!"

"No, idiots," Kate said as she walked over to their side of the table and sat next to Adam. "You have a twin, _Scarlet Heir_."

"What?" Adam said impatiently. "What makes _your guess_ more probable than time travel?"

"Or clones," Ruixian piped in.

"Or clones," he included magnanimously.

Hawkeye took a deep sigh and said, "Look. I know you haven't been with the Avengers for a while now, Adam. And Ruixian, poor girl, god knows what this guy has been teaching you. But in real life, it's very rare to have a mish-mash of plot threads that don't make internal sense as a whole."

"Really?" Adam asked skeptically. "Because I haven't always found real life to be so coherent."

"What I'm trying to say is you have to settle with the simplest explanation that agrees with already known facts. Occam's Razor."

"And what facts, pray tell, would those be, Miss I'm-so-Logical," Adam demanded.

"Four facts. Number one: Asgardian and the Witch are the only two beings capable of using Chaos magic. Number two: The Witch gave birth to twins. Number three: Our Adam-look-alike has white hair. And number four: Guess who else has white hair."

Adam's eyes grew wide and a sudden pang stabbed through his head. "Quicksilver," he whispered to Hawkeye's self-satisfied nodding.

"That's a flimsy line of reasoning," Ruixian protested with a scowl.

Hawkeye shrugged. "It's the most internally consistent explanation we can make that doesn't have to speculate extra variables like cloning or time travel. Think about it. A pair of twins, both Avengers: one Chaos magic user and a silver-haired speedster. Add the fact that the Witch gave birth to twins and now we have two guys who look identical running around. And one of them has Chaos magic and the other silver hair? The best explanation that makes sense is that they're the lost sons of the Witch. It's the best fit curve without having to extrapolate."

"I guess," Ruixian said, still sounding unconvinced. "Did you see the super speed?"

"Admittedly, no. But once we do, that would just about validate the hypothesis," Hawkeye said. "Do you understand now, Adam? Why I need your help?"

Ruixian crossed her arms and swivelled her chair to face Hawkeye. "I still don't get it, though. If these First Seven families are so powerful, can't they protect themselves from _one_ little speedster?"

"Given the times? No. Not right now."

"What times? Why not?"

Hawkeye looked at her, taken aback, and then turned back to Adam. "You haven't told her? Would you like to, Adam? Or should I?"

"Tell me what?" Ruixian asked, her eyes shifting back and forth between Adam and Hawkeye.

Adam twisted to look at her and swallowed; this was one memory that he didn't forget. "They can't, Ray," he said, a little apologetically.

"If they're that strong, why not?"

"Because magic is broken. And it's broken because I wouldn't ascend to the Supremacy. Ray, the Seven aren't strong enough to fight back because of me."

A fleeting look of disappointment crossed Ruixian's face before she turned her seat away from him and replaced her hands on the table. "I mean, it's not _really_ your fault, Adam," she said, immediately schooling her expression into something less transparent. "You have every right. Like you say, nobody should be forced to make sacrifices he doesn't want to make. There's a cold brutal logic to that."

 _Great,_ Adam thought. And then another memory surfaced painfully. _It's Singapore all over again._

"It has to be connected," Hawkeye said. "I'm sorry, this is gonna sound bad. I'm not saying it's your fault but… your twin killing off the First Seven which had been left unprotected because you won't take the throne? There _has_ to be a connection. It's almost poetically circular."

"Yeah, I think so too. I just can't put my finger to it. There's a pattern here we're not seeing."

* * *

Later, on their way back to his room, Ruixian paused stopped his wheelchair just outside the door. Even with him sitting in the chair, she was just barely taller.

"So?" she asked _a propos_ of nothing.

"So what?" Adam asked back, more grumpily than he intended. He had managed to sustain longer stretches of lucidity over the weeks and his thoughts had become more cogent. But the long meeting with Hawkeye strained him and he was sure that the mild pounding in his head would later blossom into a migraine.

"Are we gonna help her?"

Adam took a deep breath and sighed. "Look, Ray. I want to. You know I do. She is—was my friend, a long time ago. I don't remember it perfectly but I do remember how that _felt_." He paused and swallowed, shaking away the throbbing in his head before continuing, "But… mystics, the First Seven, the Supremacy, my _alleged_ twin brother to the Witch… I—I don't think I can."

"I understand," she said as she placed a hand on his shoulder. The speed of her response surprised him, as if she had already known his answer before she'd even asked. "It's too close, isn't?"

Adam nodded, placing his hands gently on the metal box in his lap. The imbued magic stirred threateningly at his touch.

"Too close to Chaos magic," Ruixian said.

Adam twisted in his chair to look at her. "I'm sorry, Ray. I can't be the hero you want me to be," he said.

 _Stupid, useless, selfish Adam._

"That's all right." She leaned to one side of his chair and looked up to him with a grin. "I can be hero enough for the both of us, I think."

"You'll help Kate?" asked Adam with raised eyebrows.

"Yeah," she replied as she stood up and touched the contact to open the door. "I could call myself… _Neurona_."

" _Neurona_? Really?" Adam snorted. "Lame. How about... _Synapse_?"

"Synapse," she said carefully, testing the word. "I like it! It's a proper superhero name. An _Avenger_ name." She turned to him and twirled, arms pressed tight to her sides and her face blushing; her loose-fitting gray overalls billowed up slightly. He'd never seen her do _that_. "You think Hawkeye would let me?" she said, shoulders climbing to her ears and one heel lifting of the ground. "Be an Avenger, I mean?"

It was a challenge to Adam's self-control not to make a face. An Avenger? _Ruixian_? After everything SHIELD and their Avengers had done? What they _hadn't_ done? He had definitely never heard her say _that_! Instead, he pulled his lips into a tight smile and said in what he hoped was a jocular tone, "Don't even joke about that."

Ruixian made a face and shrugged. "I'll help Kate. While we're here, anyway. You know me; where you go, I follow. Besides, who else would eat your overcooked noodles?"

"Hah! Don't lie; you love 'em."

"It's an abusive relationship," she said with mock gravity, shaking her head slowly. "I just don't know what's good anymore. Other noodles are just way too firm and springy now."

"Nah, you love my noodles," he said, laughing as she made gagging sounds.

That night, Adam lay on his bed thinking of a silver-haired boy who had his face. If they had found each other before the war, could it have turned out differently? With a brother's love to protect him, would he still have run away? Would he still have cast that wretched spell that stripped every memory of whoever he had been? They might have been the heroes that he had dreamed he'd be, in that forgotten life he had had before the Avengers' wrath crushed him in its pragmatic fist—squeezed him so tight until he was raw and bloody and the only thing left of him was the black oozing mush that called itself Adam Thorne, the distillation of the worst parts of who he had been before: cowardice, self-pity, rage. If every spell came at a price, then this must be the cost of creating Adam Thorne: nothing less but the abandonment of the very self.

He wondered again, if it could have all been avoided. If they had found each other before the war, his brother might not have become a murderer and he might not have become Adam Thorne. They could have been heroes. They could have been Young Avengers.

 _Well, those are two words that haven't crossed my mind in a long time_ , he thought sleepily.

That night, his exhaustion and headache won, and he slept.

An image had lingered and seeped through his dreams. He was on a mission with the Avengers. A sentinel attack near Utopia. It wasn't going well. Cap's body was bent over a boulder, his spine at an unnatural angle over the jut of the rock. Mutant corpses in a shallow pool floated around his ankles in a mass grave as mages and inhumans fell from the sky and made streaking lines like comets.

Hawkeye grabbed his elbow and spun him around violently. "Get us out, Asgardian!" he screamed just before a steel rod speared through his open mouth and he melted into a heap of maggots.

Terrified, Asgardian slowly turned his head and saw the sentinel's yellow eye on him. Only it wasn't a sentinel, no, not really. It had Wolverine's claws and Ironman's armor in a tattered Captain America suit. Flying about its forehead like a divine halo was the mighty eagle of SHIELD, sleek and metallic against the blood-red sky. Its eyes glowed red behind the Ironman mask as its gore-stained hand grabbed for him.

Asgardian tried to fly, to run, but the corpses pulled on his legs and dragged him under. The water closed over him, black and viscous, as rotting hands clamped over his limbs, fingers digging viciously into his flesh. When he looked up, he saw the water's surface, smooth as glass, and behind it, his own face reflected back at him in a soundless scream. His own face contorted in terror amidst a tangle of silver hair and staring back at him with brilliant green eyes.

* * *

 _Light spilled out above him, buzzing, disperse, from a streetlamp that made a conical spotlight on the smooth pathway. Around him was shrubbery of middling height under a blanket of snow and further away, in the darkness, the silhouettes of looming trees scattered around wide clearings. There was the sharp fragrant smell of something flowery that he couldn't identify and of wet grass. Billy limped forward, shivering in the cold and barely registering the hand around his wrist._

 _"You okay?" Teddy asked._

 _"Yeah, I think I was having a nightmare," Billy slurred._

 _"You were," Teddy said as he wrapped his arm around Billy's shoulders. "Just a dream. It's gone now. What was it about?"_

 _"I don't remember." Billy turned up to him and smiled, "My hero."_

 _He huddled closer to Teddy's warmth and sighed appreciatively._

 _"Not fair. You don't even need this," Billy said, reaching out to unbutton Teddy's coat. "Gimme."_

 _"Down, boy." Teddy chuckled, grabbing Billy's hand and holding it back. "You're drunk, Billy."_

 _"And you're really hot," Billy said in all seriousness, deeply convinced that Teddy was wearing too many clothes._

 _Teddy snorted. "Smooth."_

 _Teddy's face was pink and was practically glowing as a halo of light fell around his snow-flecked hair. His face had a theoretical beauty about it, an absolute symmetry that was almost mathematical in geometry_ _. He was wearing his ear cuffs tonight, rows of metal bands climbing up the delicate fold of his ears. Billy wondered what it'd be like to run his tongue along them, if they were cold and if his tongue would get stuck on one of them. That didn't sound too bad._

 _"Do you live here, Teddy?"_

 _"We're in France, Bee. Grenoble."_

Bee... that's what Teddy calls me… _he thought giddily to himself. He liked it._

 _Two girls were walking toward them, all wrapped up in heavy-looking winter clothes. They leaned to each other, giggling and holding hands, as they passed Teddy and Billy._

 _"Salut!" one of the girls called out to Teddy over her shoulder._

 _Teddy waved back with a polite smile and turned back to Billy. The girl blushed as she pressed closer to her friend and giggled again._

 _Billy shook his head and laughed. "I mean here," he said, missing his temple a couple of times as he tapped on it. "Mr. Congeniality."_

 _"Oh. No, I live somewhere else. I'm only here when I'm asleep. Or when you're here."_

 _Billy frowned. "Then how do you know this is real? I could just be a figment of your imagination! I mean have you seen me?" With his left hand, he made a sweeping motion over the length of his body and almost slipped on the sleet. "Total dreamboat."_

 _Just then, his stomach heaved as the paella he'd had for dinner decided to defy fate and make a reappearance. He managed to run to a nearby bush and to bend over just in time, before he started retching. Somewhere far off, rumbled the sound of the city tram._

 _"All right, dreamboat. Take it easy," Teddy said, stroking Billy's back with a soothing hand. Billy could hear the smile in his voice._

 _When he was done spattering sick all over the pavement, Teddy gently tugged on his elbow to draw him up._

 _"Someday, you'll realize the irony in asking me that," Teddy told him with a grin that crinkled his eyes. His hand slipped down Billy's arm and dipped to the small of his back, turning him around so they were facing each other. He held Billy against his body and rested his chin on Billy's head. "You're drunk and you're freezing. You think you could take us somewhere warmer?"_

 _Billy leaned closer into Teddy's body, shivering as strong hands rubbed against his arms; he was lost in Teddy's heat. France might turn into tundra and nowhere would be as good._

 _"I'll try," Billy murmured though he didn't really want to. "How?"_

 _"Hmmm," Teddy hummed, and Billy could feel the thrumming of Teddy's chest on his face. "Think of a memory. There's one in Santorini—wait, no—the Philippines. A river near a mountain."_

 _Billy closed his eyes and pictured the mountain in his head. The image came and went with a flash._

 _"S'not working," he mumbled after a while, secretly glad as he pressed his freezing face into the folds of Teddy's coat._

 _"All right, then," Teddy said. He wrapped his arms around Billy and murmured in a low uncertain voice, "Think of me."_

 _Billy embraced him back. He buried his face against Teddy's chest and took a deep breath, inhaling the other man's scent. Memory came to him in a flood: a violent torrent of epiphanies in fragmented feelings and disjointed imageries. Billy's eyes lit up blue and he blinked back with a surprised gasp. The memories inundated him, permeating through every crack and crevice of his mind until each cell remembered, even if just for a moment, the boy that had been Teddy Altman._

 _"I am drunk on you, Teddy Altman," Billy whispered, too soft for Teddy to hear, just as the remembrance receded and memory abandoned him once again._

 _An image appeared in his head. A yellow sun, beating down hot and humid on a golden field, endless and forever, under a vast sky of cloudless blue. A river just behind the horizon. They were sprinting and he could see the broad back of a tanned Teddy a few feet ahead, deliberately restraining his speed so Billy could keep up. Each footfall slapped against the earth with a dull stinging thud but they were both laughing as their naked bodies hurtled across the field._

 _"Hurry up, slowpoke!" Teddy called out over his shoulder as he picked up his pace. "Are you Wiccan or Wiccan't?"_

 _Billy groaned and sped up, ignoring the protests of his lungs and the acidic burn in his thighs._

 _Teddy hooted and turned away, pumping his muscular arms beside him as they ran to the edge of the world._

 _Billy thought he could do this forever. Teddy racing in front, fleet-footed, almost flying, and Billy just behind, just watching him and listening to the song of his laughter. What he'd give to just stay here, in this memory that never happened, with this boy who had never existed. Billy smiled to himself and ran faster._

 _Then, they reached the cliff and Teddy leapt over the edge into a swan dive._

 _"Geronimo!" he shouted as his body buoyed in the air, brown and gold against the blue sky._

 _Billy watched Teddy's muscles tense up, hardening as his body became a rigid T, arms stretched to the sides and spine arched in an elegant curve, taut like the bend of a bow. He drifted forward, almost flying, and climbed the sky briefly before falling headfirst into the river. It had been too quick to see anything, just the hard form of his body and the hasty glimpse of a thick cock dangling between his legs as he fell._

 _Billy lunged excitedly after Teddy, rapt with the sight of the man's grace and forgetful of the fact that he couldn't swim. He crashed noisily in the water in a squawking tangle of limbs and made a clumsy splash that hit Teddy right in the face._

 _"You know what would be great right now?" Teddy asked as he grabbed Billy's arm to help him break the surface._

 _"What?" Billy gasped, waddling in the cool water to find his rhythm._

 _"A milkshake."_

 _"You're right," Billy said. "In this heat, a milkshake would be nice. God. Even strawberry."_

 _He reached out a hand for Teddy and suddenly, too easily and casually like it was something they did normally, they were touching, wet and slick as Teddy took Billy in his arms. Billy's face grew hot at the naked slide of skin again skin and he had to place his hands over Teddy's chest, pushing back a little, to keep his hardness from touching the other man._

 _"Do you remember?" Billy asked with a shaky voice, resolutely keeping his eyes fixed on Teddy's face. Teddy's chest was smooth and firm against his hand, and a little sticky with sweat. "Do you remember me when you wake up?"_

 _"Yes," Teddy said, blue eyes dilating slightly, like sky giving way to night._ When did their faces get so close? _His wet hair clung to his forehead and a stray drop of water traced a rivulet down his cheek. "I never forgot."_

 _"I can't remember you," Billy admitted with a waterfall of guilt. Like he was ashamed. "I want to but I can't."_

 _"I know, Bee," Teddy said, leaning closer so their foreheads were touching. "But you remember me right now, right?"_

 _Billy closed his eyes and breathed in the scent of Teddy. Of earth and sun and something salty and metallic that was only Teddy's. "A little. It's fuzzy and a lot of pieces are missing. It helps when I'm reliving the memory. I don't… I don't remember you but I remember…" Billy paused, trying to find the right words. "I don't remember you but I remember how it felt. How it felt to—" he paused again, to search for the right verb, "—to… to_ know _you."_

 _"Yeah?" Teddy's breath was hot and heavy on Billy's skin, sweet as mangoes. "How did it feel?_

 _"It felt…" Billy said as he opened his eyes. Teddy's skin was flushed, his pink lips parted slightly. "I don't remember right now."_

 _"Does this help?"_

 _A strong hand—warm, heavy, rough—glided up his back, tracing the dip of his spine with its palm until it cupped the base of his skull and spread its fingers through his hair, eliciting a moan from his throat. A stray thought passed his mind, a final protest from his dwindling sense of self-preservation: a squeeze from Teddy and he could crush Billy's skull, or a twist and he'd snap his spine. Billy would be dead and he won't even see it coming; he was naked and defenseless—a naked oblation to this demigod who was made of the stuff of dreams._

 _And he knew, to the very last atom of his body, that he was in the safest place in the universe. Right there in Teddy's arms._

 _Billy looked up and saw that Teddy's eyes were dark and half-lidded. He felt like an overstretched spring, on the brink of yielding to this foreign force and yet struggling with all its might to preserve its shape—though for what inane reason, his mind could no longer justify. It took every ounce of self-restraint not to look down and steal a glance of Teddy's cock in the crystal clear water, to see if he was also hard._

 _"A little," Billy said, licking his lip, and then in a trembling voice added, "Help me remember."_

 _Another hand slid down his back and cupped his ass, giving it a firm squeeze. "How did it feel, Billy Kaplan? Do you remember how it felt?"_ Do you remember how I felt? _, were his unspoken words._

 _"It felt…"_

 _He sank forward into Teddy's body and their noses touched. His head spun with thoughts of absurdities._

 _An inch of space between their lips. Just air. Just an inch. And yet that inch between their lips was everything. So much distance compressed in an inch. Between Teddy and Billy. Between Truth and Dream. Possibility and Reality. All things blurring together._

 _Just an inch. How could there be so much distance in an inch?_

 _Between Hope and Surrender._

 _Billy Kaplan and Adam Thorne._

 _Billy and Teddy… Teddy and Billy…_

 _Just an inch between two creatures of memory._

 _"It felt um…" Billy swallowed, his lips brushing Teddy's as he spoke, and the last of his resolve crumbled, all resistance melting away under the golden heat of a summer sun._

 _He slid his hands up Teddy's chest and his arms wrapped around Teddy's neck, drawing him close to let their bodies finally collide, sighing as his stiffness slid against the hard muscles of Teddy's stomach. He kept his eyes fixed on Teddy's face, even as the other man gathered his hair in a loose fist and tugged. Even as Teddy pressed Billy's groin harder against him. Even as his leg drifted forward in the water and the underside brushed against the tip of Teddy's hard cock._

 _They leaned in closer. Lips almost touching now. Just a nudge. Almost. A shared breath in a shared memory. Between a boy who can't remember and the boy who was memory._

 _"Remember me, Billy," Teddy whispered in a voice faint as a wisp. "Remember me and find me."_

* * *

Adam woke with a gasp, disoriented, blind, and overwhelmed with the coldness of the room. It was an assault that seeped deep through his skin and chilled his flesh. He longed for the sun. For heat and light and air away from this cold dead hole in the ground.

 _Heat. Sun. And water, cool on his naked skin. Someone else—Teddy. A naked sky above them._

There was a wild frustration in him that he didn't immediately comprehend—a crack down his core that split him into contradictory halves, pulled simultaneously in two directions—and that might have startled him if he was not so absolutely consumed by this paramount need. He couldn't have stopped if his life depended on it.

Ice struck bone.

 _Heat washed over him and he closed his eyes against the light. A shuddering in his core, then exploding, expanding, sweeping through every nerve and muscle._

 _Stars bloomed behind his eyelids.  
_

"Fuck," Adam groaned as he crested on the edge of this violent tearing.

The room was too cold, like the vacuum of space. His body stretched on the bed—lengthening to its breaking point as his calves began to cramp.

 _Water crashing against him as he pressed into Teddy's stomach. Strong arms locked around him. Fingers digging into the softness of his flesh. A cry left his lips._

His chest heaved out, upwards towards the frigid sky, yearning to untether him from the earth, to fly again.

Back arching, heels digging into the mattress. He closed his eyes and moaned.

 _More heat. From sun and sky and flesh. Teddy's sweet breath was thick and heavy on his face and neck. His skin on fire.  
_

 _His body slipped downwards. His legs wrapped around Teddy's muscular thighs. They groaned together, breaths mixing in the space between lips.  
_

His weight lifted off the bed and the cold rushed him like a punch to the gut, drawing a violent gasp from his lungs. Magic—Form and Chaos—surged through his muscles as his body curved in the frigid air, a glowing blue crescent that pulsed with each frantic heartbeat.

He needed to be touched, and held, and kissed. _Fuck_ , he had never felt so alone.

 _Teddy's hands all over him, claiming every inch of this holy sacrifice. His heat on Billy's body, like a protective cloak—and Billy knew that he was loved... so so loved.  
_

 _Their bodies rocked against one another. Back and forth. Back forth. Skin on skin, sliding over each other. Back and forth. Back and forth. Oscillating.  
_

Magic poured out of his pores, blanketing him in heat, like hands on his skin—almost. Feet flexing. Toes curling.

His eyes fluttered open—blue, electric, powerful—and saw the universe unfolding around him like the pages of a book.

 _Too much heat. Wetness lapping his skin. The smell of earth and water and metal. The splash of waves against rock. Teddy's warmth saturating him, his golden scent filling Billy's lungs. Billy kept his eyes shut, closed against the onslaught of the senses. All focus on his galloping heart, reaching a fevered pitch. He was somewhere else. Both places. All places.  
_

An explosion of magic. The air shuddered around him, blinding and blue. In the distance, the sounds of an alarm blared faintly.

 _"I'm here, Billy," said the golden boy in a hopeless, devastated voice. "Find me. Find me. Find me."  
_

Adam threw his head back against the emptiness beneath him and cried out in a daze, his soul split in two.

"Teddy!"

 _Billy opened his eyes and there was the sun._


	4. Young Avengers

**Young Avengers**

 _"You awake?"_

 _The wind was whistling past him hot and dry as his hair flew about in wild abandon. Under him, the cushion was firm and comfortable, vibrating only very slightly and smelling faintly of old leather and his own sweat._

 _The first thing he saw was Teddy's face, gilded in sunlight and almost glaring, hands on the steering wheel and eyes smiling at Billy behind a pair of aviators. Teddy was in a white tank top and blue jeans and his wrists were covered with leather bracelets and beads. Hair flickered wildly like a golden flame, reminding Billy of the first time they'd met in that field of barley under an infinite sky._

Unbelievable _, Billy thought with a groan. "Hey, sunshine," he said._

 _"Hmm?" Teddy asked distractedly, turning his eyes back on the road. "What's that?" There was music playing behind his voice, soft, crooning, but fast-paced; Billy recognized the words but couldn't remember the song's title._

 _He yawned and stretched, relishing the stretch of cramped muscles and the bite of scorching heat on his skin, and then reached over to Teddy, letting a sleepy finger touch a cheekbone and trace a careless line down to his chin._

 _"Nothing, never mind," Billy said, rubbing his eyes. "Where are we?"_

 _Sand—or hard soil. Hard to tell from the car. But to either side, that was all there was except for the road that seemed to slope downwards and then uphill over and across the horizon. Overhead, white billowing clouds swam in a bright blue sky and casted patches of shade on the ground. Billy reached for the vault of the sky and felt the wind between his fingers._

 _"No idea," Teddy said, turning down the music. "Somewhere on the Interstate, I guess. We only did this sort of thing once."_

 _"I can see why," Billy said. With a grimace, he shielded his eyes from the sun, which had emerged from behind a large clot of clouds._

 _They drove in silence for a while. Billy watched the sheer barrenness with uninterested eyes, occasionally glancing at Teddy as if he could disappear any moment._

You're real, right? _he thought to himself._ You're real? And you won't leave me?

 _He reached out again and let a finger rest on Teddy's forearm, grounding himself in the solidness and reality of Teddy's body._

 _"So," Teddy said in that too casual voice of his. "Who's Adam?"_

 _Billy's arm retracted as if it had touched something scalding. "How do you know Adam?"_

 _Teddy kept his eyes fixed on the road, unreadable behind the dark tint of his shades, but his lips were set in a hard line. He kept his voice steady. "You were muttering his name in your sleep."_

 _Billy frowned and turned away, glaring at the featureless earth that stretched out to the curved horizon. "It's nothing. Just a bad dream."_

 _They were quiet again for a while, each boy patiently waiting for the other to say something more. Billy folded his arms over his chest and let his stubbornness simmer under the sun but in the end, he was the first to break. He twisted back to Teddy, who was scowling and whose knuckles had turned white on the wheel, and immediately felt ashamed._

 _"I don't want to think about Adam," Billy said, making his voice as soft and gentle as he could._

 _"Okay," Teddy said after what felt like a long minute._

 _Billy gently prodded Teddy in the ribs. "Don't be jealous," he said with a sly smile._

 _"I'm not."_

 _Great. Billy felt like shit now. But how could he explain Adam to Teddy? Adam who was all darkness and fear and shame. And Teddy who was everything that had ever known bravery and warmth and love. Billy stared at Teddy's face and knew that it was wrong to speak of Adam here. He couldn't let Adam infect this place, which was everything that Adam had thrown away and could never hope to have again. This place was Teddy's and Billy's. Only theirs! Adam didn't belong here._

 _"So, um, where are we going?" Billy asked meekly._

 _"Wherever we want," Teddy said, a pained hardness settling on his voice. "You don't remember?" he asked, a little gentler, briefly glancing at Billy._

 _Billy drew his knees to his chest and chewed on his lip. "No, not really," he admitted . "Are we… are we running from something?"_

 _The thought disappointed him. It was Adam who ran, not Billy. Out there, in the real world where monsters and heroes were out to kill him. That was Adam's life. Not Billy's. Must he run too in this imagined life with Teddy?_

 _Teddy studied him, face an impassive mask, and then, having reached a decision, grinned. "Nah," he said. "It's just… uh... just a vacation. After we found the Scarlet Witch. To… uh… take a break from the Avengers." He ducked his head and rubbed the back of his neck. "We just graduated from Young Avengers to actual Avengers."_

 _"Then why do I feel so sad? Like I just lost something important..."_

 _"Not all memories are good, Bee," said Teddy softly._

 _Billy nodded, not really understanding. "What's not good about this one?"_

 _"Because—" Teddy looked away and cleared his throat "—because she had to leave again. To… uh... fix things."_

 _"Okay," Billy conceded. Teddy was obviously lying but Billy didn't want to argue. "Ugh. Change the song," he said instead when a familiar series of notes played._

 _"What?" Teddy said in mock outrage, visibly relieved at the change of subject. "Are you insulting my taste in music, Kaplan? I will not have this from someone who listens to Wicked songs on repeat."_

 _"Come on, Teddy," Billy said, flushing slightly. "It's a sad song. Play something less depressing."_

 _"It's a happy song," Teddy insisted. "A fun car song."_

 _The crisp sound of plucked guitar strings filled the air, loud and clear over the rushing wind._

 _"How is it happy?"_

 _"They're making plans to run away from a crappy life," Teddy explained. "In a car, Bee, in a car."_

 _Billy snorted and crossed his arms. "It's about disenchantment, Teddy. Disappointment and cynicism because life eventually didn't turn out the way they thought it would be."_

It's an Adam song _, he might have added but didn't._

 _"No way…" Teddy said in a disbelieving tone._

 _"They were in a homeless shelter, Tee."_

 _Teddy turned to him with a devastated look on his face, like a child who had just learned that Santa wasn't real._

 _Billy shrugged and arched an eyebrow. "It's a sad song."_

 _"Really?" Teddy reached for the radio and turned up the volume. "Well let's turn it into a happy one, then."_

 _Teddy pulled back his aviators over his hair and started nodding his head to the beat, biting his lip expectantly for the chorus. He turned to Billy and winked, blue eyes laughing and cheeks struggling to hold back a smile._

 _And despite that unnamed grief in his chest and the cheesiness of it all, Billy rolled his eyes and even managed to smile. Soon after, he was actually laughing._

 _"So I remember when you were driving," Teddy sang out, eyes shining merrily. "Driving in your car, speed so fast felt like I was drunk…"_

Oh god, let me just stay here, _Billy thought as he stared at Teddy. There was a new feeling in his chest, all warm and tingly and fluttery and spreading through his body until he felt like he could weep at the weight of it. It wasn't memory, not quite, but it was something close and something perhaps more profound._

 _"City lights laid out before us and your arm felt nice around my shoulders…"_

 _"I love you," Billy whispered, too soft for Teddy to hear. "Oh god, Teddy, I love you."_

 _He closed his eyes and threw his head back._

 _"And IIIIIIIIII," they screamed out together, Teddy passionately hitting the steering wheel with his imagined drumsticks. "Had a feeling that I belong… and IIIIII had a feeling that I could be someone… be someone…"_

 _Billy's heart thrilled as they filled the desert emptiness with happy, out of tune voices, his chest overflowing and bursting with joy. They stole occasional glances of each other, grinning and dissolving into fits of laughter every time their eyes met. And for a while, Billy didn't care about the Seven or Adam or Chaos for in that moment, the world was nothing but light and song._

* * *

…you've got a fast car

 _… is it fast enough so we could fly away?_

* * *

Adam stirred sleepily, groaning as he grabbed for the pathetically thin blanket that had slipped off during the night. He was spinning slowly, hovering obliviously some four feet above the bed, and he might have noticed his predicament sooner had he bothered to open his eyes or more decisively stretched his arm so that his fingers brushed against the ceiling. But as it was, he spent a few minutes shivering in the air in a fetal position, groping groggily in vain for a blanket or a pillow or anything to cover himself from the cold.

" _Fuck_ , I fell asleep," he whispered to himself and sighed.

And that should have terrified him. He should have been in cold sweat, heart racing, hyperventilating, and crying out in self-defeat. He should have been on his feet, fingers spell-ready for anything that might have taken advantage of his weakness the way Mother had.

But instead of all these, he was calm, perhaps too exhausted to appreciate the danger he was in and, for some reason, feeling happy and sated. Like he had just spent an afternoon lazing under the sun. He smiled stupidly into an imagined pillow and tried to remember his dream.

He stretched his body, interlaced his fingers over his head and pointed his feet as he yawned, brain still too heavy with sleep to recognize these feats for the minor medical miracles that they were. Then loudly, to the room, he said irritably, "There better _not_ be some interdimensional abomination chewing on my face when I open my eyes." He drew back his knees to his chest and hugged them. "Which I'll do in five minutes."

It must have been the complete absence of solid pressure against his body that tipped him off, followed by a feeling of lightness that made his stomach queasy the moment he'd become aware of it, and then finally, the sharp smell of ozone that burned his nose. Acting on some vague sense of suspicion, his eyes fluttered open, stared blankly at the bedside table floating over his head, and closed again. Then, a long moment later, his brain finally caught up and he woke in earnest with a squeaky yelp, flailing in the air as he twisted his head to find his bearing.

The room was rotating around him, with various pieces of furniture and some loose paraphernalia turning and spinning in the air. The lights flickered sporadically, blinding him slightly every time he passed the ceiling.

"Okay, Adam. Relax. Deep breaths," he told himself. He blinked a few times, willing the blue glow in his eyes to disappear, and then brought his hands before him. His fingers twitched instinctively, quickly bending to the proper Forms and sigils as he whispered the supplementary incantations in a rapid litany. He was too absorbed in the task of dispelling the magic that saturated the space around him to even notice the sudden restoration of his body—or that he was no longer alone in the room.

He must have made three or four complete revolutions in the air before he realized that one thing remained fixed to the ground. And once he sighted it, the figure dragged itself over to him, slowly and jerkily like it was not in full control of its limbs. It took Adam a few seconds to recognize the suit.

"E-Eli?" he said in a stammer as his hands froze in the middle of a particularly tedious dispersal Form that involved the simultaneous inflection of the pinky and middle fingers. "How are you here?" He had the same bulky body that Adam remembered but the bearing was all wrong. Even upside down, the difference was obvious: this Eli was too fluid and limp like a rag doll and the suit, though a perfect replica, didn't crease with his movements or respect the laws of light. There were no shadows behind folds of muscle where light could not have penetrated, no variations in shade in patches that faced away from the light; it was like someone had forcefully extrudeda two-dimensional construct and forgot to teach it the optical laws of three-dimensional space.

A sudden terror gripped Adam as realization dawned on him.

 _Oh, Adam, what have you done?_

"Who are you?!" he demanded with forced ferocity.

 **Awake, now,** the creature replied in a voice that seemed to echo inside his head. **Awake…** Its hand reached out for Adam and then stopped halfway. **Who are you?** Its mask creased into a frown and its head tilted to one side, body following the movement so that it was bent at the waist.

"I am Adam Thorne," Adam declared. "Now who—"

 **Denial** , the voice hissed in his head. Adam's spinning body slowly came to a halt just as he was face to face with the thing that looked like Patriot. It withdrew its hand and leaned closer.

"Who are you?" Adam whispered. The red mask was just a few inches from his face and he could see, where the eyes should have been, swirling galaxies of blue and gold struggling to take solid form, failing and then falling apart into amorphous colors. It made his head hurt to watch the bizarre spectacle.

 **Tick-tock, tick-tock.** The creature leaned back and lolled its head bonelessly to one side. The colors in its eyes changed from blue and gold to green and silver, which quickly solidified into a more decided and recognizable form: Adam's own face, frozen in a terrified scream, only with silver hair and the neckline of what looked like a green suit. **Save me.**

"Wha—hey!"

It took a step back, lifting a hand as if to wave goodbye, and Adam could only watch as its body lost opacity piece-by-piece and slowly sublimated into white smoke.

As soon as the last bit of the creature had vanished, the blue light in Adam's eyes fizzled and died. He yelped as his body fell back to the bed, which crashed to the floor with a loud screeching sound; around him, tables, chairs and loose items fell from the air and were swiftly reacquainted with gravity. There was a short cacophony as wood and metal struck the floor with loud thuds and objects made of glass shattered. In the distance, an ear-splitting alarm was shrieking incessantly.

The door opened violently, banging against the wall as it swung inwards into his room. A small group of armed men in gray poured in, Ruixian at the head of the incursion.

He barely had time to collect his wits and drag the blanket to cover his nakedness.

* * *

He was quiet as they marched out into the corridor but his thoughts were a swirling mess, turning rapidly through his brain with a vengeance to make up for weeks of idleness. Heaviest on his mind was the Patriot imposter, which had the unmistakable stench of Chaos magic all over it— _his_ Chaos magic. Adam gritted his teeth and made a frustrated rumbling sound at the back of his throat as they turned into another corridor. If the two men flanking him had heard, they didn't let it show; they marched forward, eyes set forward and with professional indifference. Adam wanted to scream into a pillow, or punch a wall or himself.

 _No! Enough with the pity party! Just get up and fix it!_

He clenched his jaw, drew the hood over his head, and kept his eyes fixed on the floor.

A few feet in front of him, a man with a black beanie was talking to Ruixian; they were muttering in low voices, heads bent over what looked like an ipad and casting the occasional furtive glance at him. Whatever it was that they were plotting, they clearly didn't think him reliable enough to be part of it; perhaps they still thought him an invalid.

But he was walking again— _God_ , it felt so good to feel his muscles stretch and contract by his own volition again—and when he checked, his fingers flexed and pointed nimbly at his sides. He was in control of his own body, no longer defenseless, and for that he was glad. He couldn't understand _how_ , of course, and that was also a problem, perhaps as important as the enigma of the vanishing Patriot.

He almost walked into a woman when they stepped inside what looked like a surveillance room. Only there did he realize that he was still naked, except for the blanket that he had wrapped around his waist and the tattered red robe that was more rags than anything.

The man in the beanie turned on his heels to face the entourage. "You two," he said, pointing to one man and one woman in front of the group. "Secure Asgardian's room. The rest, sweep the base again. Dismissed."

Six men and women executed a crisp salute and left the room to attend to their tasks, leaving Adam, Ruixian, and the man with the beanie.

"The cameras picked him up," Ruixian said, sitting on the edge of the table to face him. "He was in your room for four hours."

" _Four_ hours?" he repeated incredulously. "What was he doing?"

"Watching you sleep," she said, gesturing a command at the man, who had taken the controls.

He pushed a button and one of the monitors mounted on the wall quickly rewound.

"Wait! Wait! Stop!" Adam lunged for the man, suddenly remembering the activities of the previous night. The man reached for another button and the image on the screen froze. "You let Kate install cameras in my room?!"

"It's a security measure," Ruixian said matter-of-factly. "Which, on hindsight, was the right call."

"You could have told me!" Adam protested.

"I did. At least once a week every time you asked about them."

Above him, the man snorted. "They didn't watch you having a go at yourself if that's what you're worried about," the man said quietly, soft enough so only Adam could hear him. "No one here wants to see that."

Adam almost didn't recognize him with the black beanie covering his blond head but up close like this, with his body draped over the man's lap, there was no mistaking the face. "Ah, Ted," Adam said as he extricated himself and retreated a step back. "The nurse."

"Also the watchman on duty last night and acting base commander," he said with an unamused look on his face. He had an Australian accent, a detail that had escaped Adam for the past few weeks. "I saw everything, man. _Heard_ everything."

Adam's eyes grew wide at the implication. His own imagination churned at what Ted could be thinking… seeing this strange paralyzed mage hover in the air as he pleasured himself, and then hearing said pervert cry out his name in ecstasy, with such mystical ejaculatory force that it ripped open the fabric of reality, summoned a Lovecraftian horror and baffled the laws of gravity… That wasn't what had happened, of course; he wasn't dreaming of Ted. It was someone else.

 _Teddy_.

The sound of the name in his mind sent a shiver through him, scattering all other thoughts. Then, a jolt of pain in his head. Like something with claws had quickly reached inside and seized the name.

An uncomfortable silence fell over them as Ted stared Adam down. Adam, on his end, had tuned out everything else when he'd retreated into his own thoughts. His eyes flicked up and met Ted's and he drew his cloak tighter around his slight frame, as though to further hide his nakedness, heat pooling in his face as he turned a deep scarlet.

"Ah, well, look, Ted, I—"

The other man held up a hand and swiftly shook his head. "Look, mate. Ju-just don't mention it, aight? Really, just don't. Let's just forget about it."

Adam brought a hand to his neck and ducked his head. "Yeah, good call."

"I'm glad your hands and legs are all better. You can shower on your own now," Ted said, turning to look at him with a slight frown.

"Yes, yes, we're all very fascinated and happy," said Ruixian, sounding anything but. "But forget the tape for now. We couldn't get in, Asgardian. What the hell happened in there?"

"I don't know," he said, shaking his head to dispel the lingering embarrassment. He didn't miss how she called him by his codename but he filed that for later conversation; for now, he told them everything he could remember from the moment he had woken up.

"Adam," Ruixian said carefully. "Do you think—"

She stopped herself midway when she saw the look on Adam's face.

He turned away in shame and anger. "I don't know," he said, closing his eyes and shaking his head. "I mean it's Chaos magic. I'm sure of that. But… But it feels different. Not like Mother."

"What do you mean?"

"When I—when I brought Mother here, there was a price. The bulk of my powers to keep her in this universe. Even though I didn't want to cast the damn spell, there was price and I paid it while she was here. But this time, nothing. I don't know; it's weird."

"I thought Chaos magic has no price?" Ted interjected. "That's what Hawkeye told us."

"All magic comes at a price," Adam said grimly. " _Especially_ Chaos magic."

"Are you sure about this?" Ruixian asked. "Don't…"

She placed a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. _Don't blame yourself_ , she had wanted to say but couldn't. Because she couldn't deny that the blame was his.

And he knew that self-pity wouldn't help. But what else could Adam do? It wasn't like people _chose_ to feel guilty.

"Positive," he replied with a brusque nod. "And that's what scares me most about this. This is very… _unnatural_."

"And all this?" Ruixian held one of his hands in hers and he felt the short surge of an electric field as she quickly studied his body. She let it drop and frowned. "This is impossible. You're all healed now."

"I don't know. But it wasn't magic, I swear."

"Parts of your brain _died_ , Adam," Ruixian said, in equal measures of softness and urgency. "That's not something I can fix. So I'd like to understand how this happened."

He looked at her and, for the first time, took in the obvious exhaustion manifested in her appearance. There were no dark circles under her eyes or even a slight sickly pallor—all these things, her powers and vanity would suppress—but it was clear in the way her eyelids drooped just so slightly and how her shoulders slumped forward that she had been carrying an enormous weight. _His_ weight.

"I'm not too concerned about that right now," Adam lied. He turned away again and stared at the wall for a long moment, his jaw set and his face inscrutable. "Where's Kate anyway?"

"Away. There's a… situation," Ruixian said cautiously. "An Avenger situation."

"What situation?"

Ted and Ruixian exchanged a look, a silent conversation between them for a long second. Then, Ted turned back to the computer with a shrug as Ruixian gave Adam a lookover. "Are you _sure_ you're okay now?" she asked, concern etched deep in her face.

"Ugh!" Adam exclaimed irritably. "Ray, I just found out that I might have a secret twin-turned-assassin. And there's a cosmic monstrosity running around in my friend's old suit. Thanks to me. So don't ask me if I'm okay, dammit. I have no choice but to _be_ okay."

"You were out for two months, Adam," she said delicately. "I tried everything! We all tried everything so fucking hard. Jacob even sent in a mystic healer at some point but nothing worked. We couldn't fix you, Adam. We thought you were done for good!"

He tried to hold on to his rage but before the helpless look on his friend's face and the broken sound of her voice, it melted away into gratitude and shame for being such a burden. This wasn't how it was supposed to end up; they were supposed to be living a new life now, away from all this insanity. Instead, their lives had been dragged back, beaten and bloodied, into the Avengers' heroic world.

"Whatever happened to Glasgow?" he asked softly.

"Glasgow can wait. The world comes first"

Adam smiled. "The world, eh? Is that what Hawkeye's up to? Another global cataclysm to avert?"

Ruixian returned the smile and gave him a brusque nod. "Something big is happening, Adam," she said, turning grave. "Has been for a few months now."

"Is that what everyone had been tiptoeing around? I might have had brain damage, Ray, but I wasn't brain dead. I knew something was going down."

"Yes, you're right. Kate couldn't tell us much—what with the whole not being Avengers thing—but from what she could spare us, we know that it's pretty big. And then last night—" she broke off and took a deep breath.

"What? What happened?"

"The Inhuman monarchy has fallen, Adam."

* * *

Adam stared at her, dumbstruck, unsure of whether he'd heard her right. "Fallen?" he repeated dumbly.

She nodded emphatically, looking relieved at having said it out loud.

"There was an attack in New Attilan."

"It wasn't an attack," Ted said, swivelling his chair. "We don't know for sure, Asgardian." He had a perturbed look in his eyes, like he was on the verge of hysteria.

"What do you mean you don't know?" Adam asked.

"They all… they all…" His blue eyes had turned wide and glassy and the space around him rippled like a mirage.

"They all just fell sick," Ruixian said, placing a comforting hand on the Inhuman's shoulder.

"All of them," Ted added. He seemed to have calmed down at her touch—his voice, anyway; his eyes still had a wildness to them and his leg had begun shaking. "At the same time."

"Wait," Adam said. He brought the heel of his palm to his forehead and pressed, trying to physically wrench out the memory. "They all fell _sick_?"

"One after the other," Ruixian said. "Within a span of three months."

The hair on Adam's neck stood on end. "Oh my god," he whispered, cold sweat breaking on his skin. "She warned me."

"Who? Kate?"

"No, Maria." He looked up abruptly to meet her eyes. "We have to go after Kate."

"No, we can't," Ted said immediately. "The intruder takes priority. Hawkeye's orders."

"No, no, no, you don't understand," Adam said desperately. "She tried to warn me. And I… Oh my god. Everyone's going to die. I have to tell Kate."

He turned away from the two and took a step toward the door. There was a rustle behind him and he was prepared to strike Ted down with a quick spell but it was Ruixian's small body that had rushed to block the door.

"Adam, wait," she said, hand outstretched to push him back. "We can't go."

"Why the hell not?"

"There are Avengers there."

"So what? Maybe it's time I settle this with them once and for all."

She shook her head. "No. What I mean is there are _already_ Avengers there. We're not going to be that much more help there. Tell you what, I'll have Ted explain to Kate that this is bigger than just the Inhumans but _here_ is where we're most useful."

"It's an end of the world thing, Ray. They can—"

"Manage without our help. They do this sort of thing on the regular, Adam," she said. "That's their jurisdiction and responsibility. This Fake-triot thing, however…"

She dangled the word in front of him, knowing full well how to pull his strings.

"I see Hawkeye has been teaching you," he said acidly. He turned to Ted and asked pointedly, "Anything more to add on the _Fake-triot_ side?"

"Just one more thing, Asgardian," said Ted, swiveling back to the controls and pressing a series of buttons. "The cameras went offline for exactly twelve seconds just before things, uh, got weird," he said with a blush. He cleared his throat before continuing. "I didn't think much of it at first. Thought it was just another glitch."

" _Another_ glitch?" Adam's left eye twitched.

Ted shrugged. "It happens now and then, mate. Once a month."

"That is a serious design flaw."

"I've sent Hawkeye multiple reports."

"Okay, well get it fixed. I—"

"Whatever!" Ruixian interrupted pointedly, waving an agitated arm in Adam's direction. "No one could have done _this_ in twelve seconds. Not possible! Not even magic!" Her eyes darted toward Adam and then she added, sounding a little unsure, "Right?"

"Right," Adam said as he considered the logistics of such a spell. "Healing magic is incredibly delicate; it would take a skilled mage a few hours to cast a Formal spell to rewire nerves. Not to mention it's so exorbitant that casting it for someone else is exceedingly rare."

"And you don't exactly have a lot of friends," Ruixian said, bringing a hand to her chin. "So we've got opportunity but lack motive and means," she added, more to herself than anyone else. She was quiet for a while, brows puckered in thought and then her head flicked up to meet him in the eye. "You said _Formal_ spell. What about Chaos?"

"On my body?" Adam said haughtily, tilting his chin up. "I'd know."

Ruixian arched a skeptical eyebrow and crossed her arms.

"Believe me, Ray, if another Chaos mage walked the earth, I'd feel it; _every_ mystic would feel it."

"Then let's table that for now," she said hastily, waving an impatient hand. "Let's focus on our intruder."

"We've only got one obvious lead on that one," Ted said.

"Yeah." Ruixian nodded.

Adam looked blankly from one face to another. "We do?" And when he finally caught on, he clenched his jaw and headed for the door. "Let me change into something less comfortable."

* * *

He took his time in the shower, relishing the use of his hands and carefully scrubbing the mess on his chest. The sight of it made him blush a little and filled him with a confused fondness.

 _Teddy_ , _Teddy, Teddy_. Adam whispered the name to himself over and over under the hot water. Yet it was already slipping from his mind; later he would write it down on a piece of paper.

Not Ted. _Teddy_. His breath fogged up the glass wall.

The water was warm on his skin. Just the right pressure too. The spray felt nice on his face.

 _Teddy,_ he thought to himself again, defiant of the ache that pulsed in his brain with each hallowed syllable.

The sound of it was familiar, in the same frustrating way as a _déjà vu._ Or a song stuck in his head whose title he couldn't remember. But he did know that it was important. Essential. There was something more. Teddy was real. Or had once been real. Or the echo of something that _was_ real. Or the echo of something that _had once been_ real. Adam's mind reeled at the permutation of possibilities.

Ghost, memory, dream. Adam wasn't sure which. But he knew that, imagined or not, Teddy was the key.

 _You know my name, Teddy, even when I don't. And that should scare me... But it doesn't. It's safe with you; I just know it._

And Adam couldn't even recall the boy's face.

"Remember me and find me," Teddy had said. Those were the only words that Adam could remember; the rest, dizzying flashes of blue and gold. The attempt to peel away at the memory and peer deeper made his head throb.

 _Am I going insane?_ His mind drifted briefly toward the Witch.

With a sudden shake of his head, he dispelled the poisoned thought before it could take root. He closed his eyes and leaned forward, resting his forehead on an arm against the wall.

 _Who are you, Teddy?_

The thought washed over him as he watched the soapy water swirl down the drain.

 _What happened to you?_

* * *

High up in the air, Adam leaned up and pressed his face against the ship's window, straining his eyes to make out the communes of Chamonix scattered around the corrugation of the mighty Aiguilles Rouges. He was able to distinguish the general body of the village from the surrounding snow; from his perspective, buildings were small stubby structures that popped out of the white earth like tiny mushrooms, quartered and clustered by narrow winding veins that could only be roads. The white-blue ribbons of a frozen river spilled eagerly from the base of Montblanc, the northern face of the mountain range, and weaved its way through the village like a slender serpent, providing just about the only distinction to the otherwise slate-like panorama.

Adam turned his attention from the sight as a gale of hail and snow collided against the glass, covering it with crushed ice and making it difficult to mark out the individual communes that made up the village—not that he could have identified them by name anyway; it was just something to occupy himself.

He sat back down in his chair in the cockpit and very delicately, like it was made of glass, ran his hands over the smooth surface of the metal box on his lap and then executed a convoluted series of Forms. The protective spell reacted immediately and jabbed his palms with needle-sharp pinpricks in clear warning: _Probe no further_.

He turned the spelled object in hands and with short pulses of his own magic, closely examined every inch of its six faces. He searched for blind spots and overlooked joints, any neglected crevice that he could pry open with a quickly executed spell, and found none; the spellwork was impeccable and the composition so incredibly abstruse and pedantic that some Forms—perhaps a quarter—were unfamiliar to him. To _him_! Adam Throne, Mage of the Highest Order and Heir Supreme! As a mage, he couldn't help but admire the workmanship and technique; this was obviously done by a master, who had studied Formal magic with the discipline of a scholar.

He tried just about every Seeing Form he knew and felt like he was back again in Strange's Sanctum Sanctorum studying the Forms of Antiquity so many years ago when he had been under the old Sorcerer Supreme's tutelage.

It had been in the aftermath of the war, just two years before he became Adam Thorne. He remembered a particular day, when he had found himself kneeling on the center of a dusty room, surrounded by teetering towers of piled books and candelabras floating around him, bobbing up and down rhythmically; the air had the thick smell of oil, incense and rat piss.

"Here is a classical Cartesian fractal," Strange had been saying. The old mage was manipulating his fingers over the glowing artifact, wiggling them quickly and deftly like he was simply controlling a puppet with invisible strings from his fingers. "Variegated with a second-order Claudius-Ptolemaique differential. And then altogether arranged in a Penrose tessellation." Then, Strange was withdrawing his hands, taking the glow with them. The statuette reoriented itself and settled back on the podium. "Now you try."

Adam frowned at the abstract-looking piece of rock as he carefully maneuvered his fingers and hands to create the right sequence of Classical Forms that Strange had just demonstrated. "Pattern is a classical Cartesian fractal… Modification is a differential type, Claudius-Ptolemaique, uh, second-order… Arrangement is a tessellation in a-a Penrose." He was much slower than the Sorcerer Supreme and his movements were jerky but he was getting the job done.

"Any variation to the Penrose?"

Adam's frown deepened and a bead of sweat trickled to the tip of his nose. He could feel his eyes starting to glow. "Uh, y-yes?"

"It is a physical impossibility for the Penrose tessellation to have any variation. It's basic geometry, apprentice," Strange said with an indulgent smile. "Do you mind if I call you apprentice? I have always wanted one."

"I think I prefer 'padawan'."

Strange made a noise and shook his head in disapproval. "I think not."

The sight tugged a smirk out of Adam's lips. He wasn't the only one frustrated. _Good_.

"Do the analysis again."

"The spellform is too advanced for me," Adam protested even as he repeated the Forms, trying to mimic Strange's confident snapping movements with his own stiff fingers. "Why does magic have so much _math?_ "

"Because the universe is written in mathematics, little mage. Finger spells are the quickest type of Formal magic because they emulate that fundamental mathematics that makes up the cosmic DNA. You can't expect to cast ritual spells on the battlefield, can you? Now listen—" Strange called him by a different name but it was a blank in his memory now, like a glitch in a video "—that was only the first layer of the spellform. Show me which Forms you would use to study the second layer… Yes, good, you have accounted for the Penrose. Very elegant solution. Now, superimposed on the first layer, if you—" _thwack!_ A wooden stick cracked against his knuckles "— _No, no_ , not like that! Use the complement of Sigil 27e: ring finger to thumb of _other_ hand, all else—Yes! yes, very good, just like that—Now if you look closely, there is a superimposed Okazaki fractal to secure the Cartesian fractal of the first layer in a complementary fit. See how it's mounted anti-parallel and then very tastefully secured with a temporal lag? That's really clever. And very vogue during the Ptolemaic Antiquity. So how would you dismantle—"

"Hey, Adam?" Ruixian's voice broke his reverie.

"Huh?" he asked, blinking back.

"You okay?"

"Uh-huh," he said, a little uncertainly. "Why?"

"Your eyes are glowing."

"Oh." He brought a hand to his face and saw the blue light reflecting off his palm. "I didn't even feel it," he said as he rubbed his eyes sleepily.

He turned back to the box and shook his head vigorously, as if to clear away the cobwebs of memory. He redoubled his efforts, skimming and prodding the spellform for any sign of exploitable flaws with controlled bursts of magic, yet the box prevailed. Every variation in probing was parried easily and with an increasing hostility that forced him to drop the box at some point, when a particularly nasty riposte bit the meat under his thumb and drew blood.

"Aw, fuck." He kicked the box petulantly and yelped when it retaliated with a sharp jolt up his leg.

"Just what is in that box?" Ruixian asked from the captain's seat. From the way her voice pitched, he could tell that the question had been exasperating her for a while now.

"The usual things from Jacob," Adam said immediately. "Just some files and personal things." And the location of someone who had information on the _Ars Notoria_.

"Right," she said as she reached for the enviable mug of coffee that only she had the foresight to bring. She had been nursing it for the past two hours now, using her powers to keep it warm

"Are we there yet?" Adam asked irritably, addressing no one in particular as he replaced the metal box in his cloak. Once again, when his fingers innocently brushed the surface, he got that fleeting sensation of familiar magic.

"For the third time, yes," replied Ruixian with a touch of asperity, not letting her attention wander from the steering wheel. "Prepare for landing."

The ship lurched as they entered an air pocket, spilling some of her coffee on the floor. With a curse under her breath, she reached over the array of blinking lights and spinning gauges, pressed a few buttons, and flicked some switches. The ship shuddered beneath them for a few seconds and then stabilized into an almost imperceptible descent.

"Why do you know how to fly a plane?"

"Hawkeye taught me."

"I mean _why_ do you know how to fly a plane?"

A small smile played on her lips. "Like you said before: Hawkeye's been training me."

"That's great," he said, turning away from her and staring at the milky cloud cover obscuring the windshield. "Just great."

"It's for you, Adam," she explained.

"Okay."

"Like I said, we thought you were a goner. Jacob and Kate wanted to put you in Chamonix but I knew that you wouldn't want that so I convinced them that I'd take care of you instead. Jacob didn't agree of course but Kate somehow overruled him? I don't know; she can be really scary sometimes. But anyway she agreed with me, on the condition that I pick up a few skills so that I could take care of you."

"What kind of skills?

"A few. Just enough to take care of you."

Adam couldn't help but snort at that. He rolled his eyes and smiled.

"What?" Ruixian asked as she pushed a lever and flipped a switch.

"Come on, Ray, let's not kid ourselves here. You had her teach you these _skills_ because you want to be a superhero. And you used your disabled friend to do it," he said, waving her off when she started to protest. "No, no, I'm not mad or anything. I'm actually quite impressed with your… resourcefulness."

"Well, when you say it like that…" she said begrudgingly.

Adam laughed out loud, nearly doubling over in his seat when he saw her blushing.

"This is nice," she said in that forcedly amiable high-pitched voice of hers. She kept her eyes fixed straight ahead, watching the flurry of the elements batter the windshield. "It's like a road trip. But, you know, on a plane."

With a hum, Adam nodded to himself and even though the ship's interior was thermoregulated, a shiver rippled through his body.

"On the way to confront Kate's ex," she went on, taking a sip of coffee and giving him a sidelong glance over the rim of her mug. "Who may or may not have become an eldritch monstrosity."

Adam had actually forgotten that Eli and Kate had had a thing. But now that the fact had been mentioned in his hearing, that piece of lost memory broke through the shackles of his spell and resurfaced with a slight stabbing pain in his head. "Ow," he murmured, rubbing his temples with his fingers. He wondered if every recovered memory would be like this, so violently and excruciatingly yanked to the front of his mind with such spiteful insistence. He turned back to Ruixian and said, groaning, "Are we there yet?"

Just then, the ship broke through the cloud cover. The scene outside shifted abruptly from the white tundra of the French Alps to the eternal summer of the climate-controlled estate of Sanctuaire Chamonix. The skies had turned to a clear blinding blue, with wispy patches of undulating clouds for miles and miles unto the edge of the horizon, and the grounds were a verdant wash of rippling grass and rolling meadows, interspersed with pockets of forestry and shimmering pools of cobalt lakes. Adam could just about see the mansion's grounds nestled in the center of a thick forest cut precisely in a perfect square. Farther off, beyond the estate proper and almost touching the horizon, an immense lake dotted with brown structures along its perimeter. There were small vessels cutting across its surface, making sharp lines of white against its dark blue waters.

Their ship landed some miles from the forest surrounding the manor, on a small grass clearing where a stark white limousine was already waiting for them. With a final push of a button, Ruixian lowered the ramp and Adam shuddered at the sudden warmth seeping through his skin and the soft breeze ruffling his hair. It wasn't exactly _warm_ but it had the chill taken out of it and smelled very strongly of freshly cut grass and something artificial and flowery not unlike an air freshener.

The driver stepped out of the car as soon as their feet made contact with the grass and Adam immediately unclipped his cloak as he stepped in front of Ruixian.

" _Bienvenue_ , Mademoiselle Synapse," the smiling man said to Ruixian with a slight Indian accent. He was young, dark-skinned, and very handsome, with the kind of body that would have normally made Adam stare. "And you must be Monsieur Asgardian. "

" _C'est nous_ ," Ruixian said easily, gathering her hair in a ponytail. "But Synapse and Asgardian would do."

Adam turned to her and raised an eyebrow.

"Skills," she said with a shrug, trying hard to feign nonchalance and hide her pride. "What? I got bored. What did you think Kate's been teaching me?"

"Not French, for sure."

Ruixian smiled and turned away from him.

"I am Sami, your guide for the duration of your visit to the Sanctuaire," the smiling man said. "Mademoiselle, monsieur, if you'd please." He gestured his hand at a small empty crate in front of him. "Your weapons."

"Must we, Sami?" Ruixian asked in a lilting voice. "We are friends of Hawkeye."

"This is a peaceful place, mademoiselle. All weapons must be left behind in your ship."

With a sigh she took out a sidearm, twirled it in her forefinger, and dropped it in the box.

Adam's jaw dropped. "What the hell, _Synapse_?"

She cocked her head and shrugged again.

"Your weapons, monsieur," Sami said with polite insistence, gently shaking the box in front of him.

"I don't carry weapons," Adam said.

"The knife in the left pocket of your cloak, monsieur," the guide said, unperturbed by Adam's hostile tone. "If you forgot."

Adam made a face but surrendered the knife anyway.

"The cape too."

"The cape is a shield, not a weapon. That's allowed, _n'est-ce pas_?"

Sami shook his head, looking genuinely forlorn. " _Mais non_ , monsieur… For the peace of mind of the citizens of the Sanctuaire, I cannot permit you the cloak. They might wonder if there's anything that might… require a shield. We must not worry them unnecessarily, _non_?" He stared at Adam for a long moment, with an air of immovable patience that would brook no argument.

Adam closed his eyes and let out a slow breath. Then, he unclipped the cloak and dropped it in the crate. " _Voila. Vous êtes content_?"

" _Merci_ , monsieur," smiling Sami said.

"Then come on," Ruixian said from the side. " _Allons-y_."

" _Un moment_ , mademoiselle." Sami took out two small red boxes from inside his white coat. "A gift," he said, passing one box to Adam and the other to Ruixian. "From the Sanctuaire."

He was watching them expectantly and after exchanging a look, Adam and Ruixan opened the velvety boxes. Inside Adam's box were a bracelet and a matching necklace with a thin chain and a circular pendant. They were silvery and fashionably crafted to look as innocent as possible.

Ruixian was the first to react, too naïve and too trusting to suspect what she had in her hand even after everything that she had been through. "What is this fo—" The chain slipped through her fingers and she stood there, frozen on the spot and visibly shaking, as the necklace fell to the grass.

Adam advanced quickly on the man and grabbed him by the lapel of his white shirt. "A suppression collar?!" Power surged through his arms and smiling Sami, who was a good inch or two taller than him, lifted off the ground.

Ruixian was immediately on his side, placing a restraining hand on his arm. "Put the man down, Asgardian."

"Monsieur," Sami said, looking down at him with bright hazel eyes, calm and unruffled as if Adam wasn't prepared tear out his spine. "You are guests of the Sanctuaire Chamonix. We did not force nor request your presence here and we have not denied you entry. But we have rules here. Rules that you must follow, should you so decide to step foot on our land."

He slowly lifted a hand to his shirt's neckline and pulled, revealing a thin metallic chain that was identical to the one he had given Adam. "No weapons."

Adam pushed the man away and sneered. "You would collar yourself, mutant?"

"I am Inhuman, monsieur," Sami said placidly, smoothening the front of his shirt. He flicked a piece of lint from his shoulder and added, "But it works all the same."

"I am not wearing a suppression collar," Adam said through gritted teeth.

"Then I would have to ask your party to leave the Sanctuaire," smiling Sami said.

"Asgardian," Ruixian said mildly.

Adam turned to her and glared. "No," he said through gritted teeth.

"You think I don't understand? Me, of all people? We have no choice, Asgardian. If we want to see Eli," she said quietly, with a soft look on her face. "It's not fair to the people who live here. This is _their_ home."

Adam curled his upper lip. "Fine," he said eventually. He quickly put on the necklace and took out the bracelet from the box. "What's this one for?" he asked with a hard edge to his voice, not bothering to look at the Inhuman.

"It's a quantum scrambler, monsieur, to—"

"To disrupt the mathematical form of fingerspells."

"Yes, monsieur."

"Mademoiselle Synapse will stay on the ship," Adam said as he locked the bracelet's clasp.

"No," she said immediately. "She's going."

Before Adam could snap, Ruixian shot him a look and shook her head. "I'm going," she insisted.

"You don't have to."

"She does," Sami interjected politely. "She can't stay on Sanctuaire grounds if she won't surrender her weapons."

"She will—"

"Enough!" Ruixian snapped. "Stop talking about me in the third person. I'm right here and I'll make my own decisions. And I'm going, Asgardian. I just—" She bent down to reach for the necklace and froze again, her trembling hand halfway to the ground.

"Let me," Adam said gently as he snatched away the chain and hid it in his fist. "Here." He offered it to Ruixian, placing a comforting hand on her shoulder.

"I-I… would you h-help…"

"Of course."

Adam stepped behind her and let the necklace swing free between his fingers. Patiently, like they had all the time in the world, he stood still, watching and waiting for an indication that she was ready.

"Okay," she said, taking quick shallow breaths through her mouth. "Okay, do it." She tilted her chin up and closed her eyes just as Adam swiftly brought the necklace around her throat and secured the clasp.

"There," Adam said, squeezing Ruixian's shoulder. "You feel okay?"

"Yes," Ruixian said, a little surprised. "It's not like—not like…"

She was quiet for a while, feeling the thin chain between her fingers as she swallowed something back in her throat.

It was Sami who eventually broke the silence, with a slight look of impatience to get things moving. "The suppressor is inactive, mademoiselle," he explained. "Mr. Stark designed it such that it only activates when the wearer attempts to use superhuman abilities. And even then, you wouldn't feel it." He raised an open hand in front of him and quickly collapsed it into a fist. Except for a sudden breeze that messed the coif of his hair and a cloud that blocked the sun, nothing remarkable happened. "There is also no locking mechanism. You could take it off at the event of a crisis. Of course it goes without saying that frivolous removal of the suppressor would result in swift and immediate expulsion."

"What's that?" Adam asked suspiciously, cocking his head to detect the faint buzzing sound that was almost drowned out by the rustle of rippling grass and leaves.

"That, monsieur, is the pendant doing it's work," smiling Sami said. "If it had not, your ship would have melted into puddle." Spreading his arms gracefully, he directed their eyes to the many pools of liquid that dotted the landscape behind him. "Welcome to Sanctuaire Chamonix. Safest place on Earth."

* * *

The limousine was spacious and comfortable albeit a little incongruous to the prelapsarian naturalism that the Sanctuaire was going for. Pressed close to each other on its rear seats, Adam and Ruixian watched the synthetic Eden crawl past them as Sami rattled off about the history of the Sanctuaire, its amenities, and its notable citizens.

Even inside the car, Adam could smell the cloyingly sweet air that perfumed the estate. And though the quantum scrambler clung heavy on his wrist, blocking all mystical forms of sensing, he couldn't help but feel a little unnerved by the sheer artificiality of the place; even the very branches of the trees swayed so stiffly in the wind that they looked as if they were made of plastic.

But there were people walking about and that relieved the uncanniness somewhat. Most of them were in pairs: plenty of couples holding hands and some in hospital gowns, accompanied by nurses or therapists. A few wandered the grounds alone, with pained and wistful looks on their faces, but there were also groups of screeching children playing tag between the foothills. Some of them, the bigger ones especially, were climbing trees and taking turns pushing each other down the hills. The sight brought a small smile to Adam's lips until he saw the suppressor collars around their necks glinting radiantly like knives to their throats.

It was well past noon—Moldova-time, at least—when they reached the mansion's gates, if the despicable roaring of Adam's stomach could be trusted. Sami took them straight to the guesthouse, a modest two-story brownstone decorated with trellises, vines, and a four-tiered fountain in the center of a roundabout. There were gazebos and benches on the manicured lawn but aside from the fastidiously conserved flora, the house exhibited no other signs of life.

Inside were sprawling rooms and corridors all done up in hard wood and richly decorated with rugs, portraits, crystal chandeliers, and more sweet-smelling plants. Sami took them right away to the living room, where a bountiful spread of cheeses, bread, and cold meats had already been prepared on the coffee table, accompanied on the side by a few bottles of wine, red, white, and even sweet.

Ruixian let out a low whistle as she picked up the _Moscato_ from the ice bucket.

"The Sanctuaire inherited nearly half of the Stark fortune," Sami said with a tone that somehow managed to be a delicate balance of modesty, gratitude, and grief. "We are very fortunate."

 _God,_ the guy really got on Adam's nerves. "Least Stark could do," he grumbled.

"Mademoiselle, would Hawkeye be joining us in the Sanctuaire?" asked smiling Sami, eye twitching as he pretended not to have heard Adam's remark.

"Yes," Ruixian said. She walked over to the table and grabbed a plate. "As soon as she can. Tomorrow, maybe." She plopped down on the sofa and began piling meats on her plate.

"Splendid," their host said through a tight-lipped smile, watching her with narrowed eyes. He spread his arms again and bowed. "Please, mademoiselle, monsieur, enjoy the hospitality of the Sanctuaire Chamonix. If you have need of anything, just pick up the phone and someone from the mansion would assist you. I have other things to attend to at the moment but I will meet you again in the morning. In the meantime, you have freedom of the grounds."

Without waiting for their response, he turned and made for the door.

"Wait!" Adam said, reaching out to grab his arm as he passed him by. "Can we see Eli now?"

Sami frowned at the hand on his arm and Adam quickly released his grip. Then, Sami made a show of looking at his wristwatch and turned back to Adam with an apologetic smile. "It is past visiting hours, Asgardian. Monsieur Bradley would see you tomorrow morning."

"It's an emergency," Adam said in a hard voice.

"My apologies, monsieur," smiling Sami said in a voice just as hard. "Perhaps you could come earlier next time."

With that, he took another bow and left.

* * *

They stayed in the living room until about seven-thirty, gorging on cheese and meat, followed almost immediately by a small feast of tartares of beef and salmon, snails, some sour-tasting salad, and a whole suckling pig roasted and dripping with gravy, all washed down with an assortment of wine that all tasted the same to Adam. They passed the time genially, gossiping about the other residents of the Roost and even telling jokes—as if they weren't in one of Stark's PR-friendly prisons, in the middle of a frozen wasteland, collared and made powerless. At some point they fell to leaning against each other, legs sprawled out on the floor and sitting against the sofa's legs as they giggled at tales of Ted's awkwardness and took turns doing impressions of Kate, an activity that conjured a feeling of mild terror in Adam and made him glance occasionally at the door.

They were very good at this, burying their heads in the sand and pretending that nothing was wrong. If she was doing all this for his sake, she played her part well; it almost felt like they were back in Madripoor. Only this time, Adam noticed that she wasn't even trying to match him glass for glass and that she kept looking out the window, as if distracted and drawn to something calling out to her.

When the last of the evening sun finally died out ( _God,_ Adam thought, _even the fucking light looks fake_ ), Ruixian stood up and walked to the door, swaying uneasily on her feet. "I'm going out for a walk," she said over her shoulder, smiling and lying so easily. "You gonna be all right here on your own?"

He could have said he wanted to go with her. Or that it was too dangerous to go out alone. Or that he knew what she was really up to. He would have, if this were still Madripoor and if she were still the girl that she had been in their garden city. It had only been three months since but already, it felt more like years.

So instead, Adam lolled back his head on the sofa's cushion and waved her off with a grin, pretending to be more drunk than he was. Still smiling, he watched her amble out the door and felt like she had already gone a long time ago.

* * *

When Adam walked into the kitchen the next morning, Kate was already there, muttering something to Ruixian in a voice too low for him to hear. They were seated across each other, heads bent over a plate of toast pieces between them. Off to the side, closer to the backdoor, was Sami, standing patiently and wearing a handsome smile as always.

Adam saw Kate's eyes flick to him as soon as he stepped through the door and she immediately broke off whatever she had been saying to Ruixian. She swivelled in her chair and crossed her legs. "Oh, hey you," she said, giving him a quick scan. "Sleep well?"

"Well enough," Adam said coldly, giving Sami a curt nod. He walked up to the fridge and pulled out a carton of orange juice. He didn't bother with a glass; instead, he pulled off the plastic cap and took a swig. The cool liquid poured down his throat and he sighed with a relish. "What are you two talking about? Not interrupting something, am I, Hawkeye?"

"Nothing, just catching up," Kate said innocently.

"What's the news from New York?"

"Pretty bad. I'm expecting a call to Assemble any day now." She glanced over at Sami and added, "But let's not talk about that right now."

"Adam, you slept?" Ruixian asked, sounding a little surprised as she daintily tore off the crust from a slice of toast.

"Like a rock," he said. He took a chair between them and picked at her shed crust. "I reckoned I've already ripped open the fabric of reality for one cosmic horror to pass through, what's another one? And there has to be a quota for this sort of thing, right?"

"Wow," Ruixian said skeptically. "You're being very cavalier about this."

Adam shrugged as he dangled the piece between his fingers and took a crunchy bite. "So _qu'est-ce qu'on fait aujourd'hui_? What's the plan _du jour_?"

The sun was streaming in through the window to his left, sharp and unforgivingly bright, and the kitchen had the floral scent of being freshly scrubbed. Not the same saccharine smell that saturated the outdoors but just as noxious. Adam wondered how the residents of the Sanctuaire could stomach the way things smelled around here or if they just got used to it. Perhaps _he_ smelled strange and unbearable to them.

"I think ' _pour la journée'_ works better, if we're mixing languages," Kate said. "But whichever way you want to say it, the plan of the day is Eli."

"Sami said he'll take us this morning," Ruixian supplied and turned to their host with an inquisitive look.

"Alas, mademoiselle, I cannot," the man said, looking the very image of tragedy. "You can—"

"Why not?" Kate demanded. "This is an official Avenger business."

"I understand, mademoiselle, but—"

" _Avenger_. Like your benefactor."

Sami's smiled again as his shoulders rose and fell in exasperation. "If you'd let me finish, Hawkeye... Monsieur Bradley attended a little… _soirée_ last night and he won't be up until lunch. I would take you to him then."

"You would take us to him, now," Hawkeye said fiercely, rising to her feet and picking up her bag as if the matter had already been settled.

Sami looked scandalized. "But mademoiselle!" he said, his perfectly amiable mask broken for the first time. " _Il s'est—_ He's asleep!"

"I don't care. I want to see him," Hawkeye glared at Adam and Ruixian and they immediately got on their feet. " _Now_."

Adam couldn't help but smirk as the defeated man's face crumpled impressively into something that was half-grimace and half-smile. Sami bowed and led them out the door in trudging steps.

* * *

"What's wrong with him?" Ruixian asked, reaching out instinctively with her fingers. There was a moment of forgetfulness when she touched Eli's head, followed immediately by the faint buzzing of her suppressor. "Oh. Right," she said with a start, hand flying to her throat.

Adam gave her shoulder a light squeeze and then turned to Kate, who was standing on the other side of the bed. She had been staring quietly at Eli since they'd entered his room, chewing distractedly on her bottom lip as if in deep thought. She had that look on her face… that look that she used to have—that _he_ used to have—when they had been younger and the world had been kinder and full of heroes. He couldn't really name it. What? Hope? The desire to make things better? He didn't know now.

"How long since you've last seen him?" asked Adam in an attempt to pull draw out of whatever Hawkeye thoughts churning in her head.

"Seven years," Kate said without tearing her eyes off Eli's sleeping face. "You?"

"Nine. Just after the war."

Nine years? Had it really been that long? Nine years since the imprisonment and demise of more than half the superhero community. Seven years since the Sons of the Serpents. Seven years since he became Adam Thorne. He suddenly felt so old and so tired _._

"Huh. Do you mean that time we put him there?"

"Uh… yeah, I guess so."

"Are we terrible friends?" she asked, brows knitting together as she finally looked up.

Adam couldn't have given her a truthful answer. Because the truth was a messy thing all tangled up with excuses and rationalizing that distorted it into something that would have made an Avenger wince, gesture around vaguely, and say things like 'complicated' or 'gray'. The truth was that everything had become so complicated after the war. They all had to choose sides and those who had chosen wrong had gone into hiding. Between saving the world and saving themselves from it, who had the luxury to visit fallen friends? At least that was _his_ excuse, which he knew couldn't have extended to Kate, who had been welcomed back by the Avengers and had the freedom and resources to visit Chamonix anytime she wanted.

It was Ruixian who finally broke the silence, with a question that Adam dreaded answering. "What happened to him?" She picked up the chart hanging at the foot of Eli's bed and flipped through. "This kind of damage… Was he a mage too?"

Adam looked her in the eye and slowly shook his head. "Ray… Eli, he—he was—"

"He was taking MGH," Kate finished for him.

There was a loud clatter as Ruixian dropped the chart on the floor. Without another word, she quickly turned on her heels and fled the room.

"No. Let her go," Kate said when Adam took a step after her. "No time for all that right now. We have a job to do. Search the room for his old costume."

He watched the door close behind Ruixian and, with only a slight grumble, acquiesced to Kate's orders. They started with the drawers and cabinets, searching for anything that might connect Eli to the Faketriot, and found only sets of identical white overalls hanging neatly and some balled up socks and soft slippers. One of the drawers was labeled 'Personal' so Adam shied away from it. Kate, on the other hand, gently pushed him aside with a soft _tsk_ and shamelessly rifled through Eli's affairs and again found nothing. Eventually, they moved on to less conventional and more deliberate hiding places: nooks behind curtain rods, loose tiles, and under cushions. It helped that the room was only sparsely furnished, even more minimal than Adam's room in the Roost; some ten minutes later, just as Kate was about to tear open the mattress with a fork, he found the old costume folded inside a cardboard box tucked under the bed and cleverly pushed against the wall so that you wouldn't notice it unless you were purposefully searching.

"It wasn't Eli," she concluded immediately as Adam stuffed the old uniform back in. "Or this costume."

"How do you know?"

"There is a clear perimeter of dust on the floor around the box, which means it hasn't been retrieved in some time. And to corroborate that, the box itself is dusty, which means it hasn't been opened in a while."

"Then what's our next move?" Adam asked as he gathered the papers that Ruixian had spilled on the floor and clipped them back onto the plastic board.

Kate huffed a sigh and crossed her arms over her chest. "I don't know," she said, bringing a hand to her eyes. "But we just wasted two days here."

Adam's eyes fell on the name of the attending physician. "Oh, I don't know about that. I have a feeling we're on the right track."

"What makes you think so?" Her voice sounded so tired.

He replaced the chart on the railing and traced the name with his finger. "Just a hunch."

It read: _Dr. Dorothy Talman._

* * *

For lunch, Sami brought them to the cafeteria where he had directed Ruixian to wait. It was a somber room, smaller than Adam was expecting, and filled mostly with hospital staff; Adam looked around and saw only one other group of visitors who were sitting by the large windows. There was a short line for the food, which was not as over the top as the dinner that they had had in the guesthouse, though Adam thought they could still have done without the wine selection.

Smiling Sami, master of small talk, was on host mode again, insistent that meals ought be social affairs. He explained and bored them with details of the hospital's history and its advancements in medical research, seemingly oblivious of the fact that nobody was listening to him.

When they were done, he walked them back to the lobby where a dark-haired man was sitting behind a desk, face hidden by a tall computer screen.

"Nurse, has Monsieur Bradley woken yet?" Sami asked.

" _Un moment_ ," the nurse replied with a raised finger. He peered over the top of his screen, revealing brown eyes and a mop of black hair, and retreated immediately to his chair, quickly punching in a series of commands on his keyboard. "Uh… _il s'est reveillé_ ," he said in poorly accented French. "Would you like to see him now?"

" _S'il vous plaît_."

"This was scheduled for tomorrow."

"Our guests are insistent."

"Oh?" The nurse heaved a sigh. "Please wait in Room 26B."

"Could he receive visitors tomorrow as well?" Sami asked.

Adam frowned and turned to Kate. Where they staying another day? She shrugged.

"Y-yes," the nurse said in a funny voice. He glanced at them again over the screen and scowled disapprovingly.

"We will wait in 26B," Sami said with finality. " _Merci_."

That wait lasted for nearly an hour, which they spent hardly talking except to declare whenever anyone had need of the restroom. Kate was on her ipad the whole time, alternating between reading an Avenger report and playing candy crush, while Adam had ensconced himself on the carpeted floor and meditated. Ruixian was especially quiet; she had taken a chair some distance from Adam and Kate and had shrunk into herself, legs crossed and arms folded tight across her chest, adamantly impenetrable to Sami's attempts to draw her out and coax her into conversation.

At about three o'clock, the door opened and a figured entered the room. Adam's eyes flicked readily to a glare, prepared to berate the nurse for making them wait so long.

Only it was neither the nurse nor Eli who came through the door. It was a young blonde woman, lithe and tall, wearing a loose-fitting blue chemise and black leggings. She had a slightly disheveled look about her, as if she had just woken up and had rushed to get here.

Sami was quickly on his feet. " _Que'est-ce que c'est_?" he demanded. "Why are you here, mademoiselle?"

"Uh, the nurse asked me to come today," the woman said meekly.

"The _nurse_?!" Sami asked, outraged.

Adam almost didn't recognize her with her hair cut so short. He rose slowly from his chair, staring at her in shock. "Cassie?"

She turned to him and frowned. "Who are—"

She staggered back a few steps just as Adam's hands flew to his head. "Aw, fuck," he muttered as a mild throbbing slowly deepened into a full-blown migraine. The spell was struggling vehemently to keep itself from falling apart and the violence, though not as severe as that first time with Kate, still jolted his bones and pounded against his skull.

When the searing pain finally passed, he found himself crumpled on the floor, looking up at Ruixian's blurred face.

"Adam?" Cassie asked.

He twisted to look at her and saw that she had turned pale, propped up on the floor by Sami and Kate. "Cassie," was all he could manage as he struggled to get to his feet.

"What's happening?" she asked, looking dazed. "I—"

The door opened again and in came Eli on a wheelchair, pushed forward by the dark-haired nurse wearing a facemask to cover his mouth and nose. Eli's head was tipped forward and his eyes were open, staring unseeing at the floor; drool trickled down one side of his mouth.

"What is the meaning of this?" Sami demanded. He rose to his feet and went up to the nurse. "Why is she here today? Explain yourself!"

"I'm sorry, I still suck at this," the nurse said, though he was looking at Cassie and Kate instead of Sami. "But we don't have time."

"Nurse!" Sami shouted. " _Repondez-moi_!"

"I've made a grave miscalculation," the nurse said, still ignoring the livid Inhuman. He took off his facemask and turned to Adam.

"We have to go _now_ , Asgardian," Nate said urgently.

* * *

Adam stared at him for a long moment, dumbstruck and speechless. His first thought was that Nate looked small, followed immediately by the realization that the boy hadn't aged since the day he had driven a sword through Kang's chest.

"Did you hear me?" Nate said as he shoved Sami off him. "I said we have to go now."

Ruixian was immediately at Adam's side. "What's happening?" she asked, instinctively clinging on to his sleeve.

"I don't know," he said, careful not to take his eyes off Nate. He took a step forward and placed himself between Ruixian and Nate. "But I don't like it. That there is Kang the Conqueror."

"Iron Lad," Nate said, looking hurt. "Please, we don't have—"

"Baby Kang," Kate said more decisively. She helped Cassie stand up, supporting her with an arm around the waist. "What are you doing here?"

"What else? Saving the world, of course!" he said with a faltering grin, glancing back at Cassie. "Please, we have to go. They were supposed to wait until tomorrow."

"Who?" Kate demanded. "What's—"

Then the ceiling over them collapsed in a loud explosion.

With a loud curse, Kate flung Cassie in Adam's direction and leapt away from the falling debris. She landed on her feet, combat-ready, some distance from the heap of rubble that separated Nate, Eli, and Sami from them.

"Cassie!" Nate shouted from the other side, through a thick wall of rock and dust clouds.

"I'm okay, Nate!" Cassie shouted back. "I—I—"

"What the _fuck_ is going on?!" Sami snapped, then began cursing in French too quick for Adam to understand.

Some orderlies fell through the hole in the ceiling and stalked toward them, all wielding knives.

"We'll meet you at front gates, Iron Lad!" Kate called out as she kicked an orderly and sent it crashing into two others. "Take care of Sam and Eli!"

Then, without a second word, she turned on her heels and dragged the rest of them through the door and out the corridor.

"That way!" Cassie said, pointing to the right. Behind them, there was another explosion followed immediately by Sami's ear-splitting shriek.

Distracted by the sudden sound, Adam didn't notice the nurse waiting for them outside the door. Hawkeye elbowed him to the side just as the woman in pink overalls slashed at him with a scalpel. With a kick to the side of the knee followed by a punch to the jaw, Hawkeye swiftly pinned her down and knocked her unconscious.

"Thanks but I—"

"Let's go," Hawkeye said, grabbing Cassie and running to the direction she had pointed.

"Here," Cassie said, pointing weakly at the fire exit. Behind, the corridor swelled with frenzied nurses and patients running after them.

"Go, go, go!" Kate shouted over their pursuers' shrieks as she roughly shoved them through the door.

She slammed the door behind them and quickly secured the bolts. Adam could hear indignant wails and loud thuds as bodies flung themselves against the locked door.

"What the fuck?!" he said as the metal frame slowly pocked and dented. "Is this a freaking zombie apocalypse?!"

"Don't even joke about that," Hawkeye muttered. "We're only on the fourth floor. Come on."

They wound their way through the emergency shaft carefully, taking turns with helping Cassie down. Above them, the hysterical banging of flesh against metal never ceased. Just as they rounded on the last flight of stairs, two men appeared behind the corner and rushed up to meet them. Adam took a step forward but before he could even respond, Ruixian was already slipping past him, planting the heel of her palm into the solar plexus of one of the men and driving him back down the stairs. Then, she quickly ripped off her collar and slammed her hand on the other man's face. "Sleep!" she cried as she pushed him back. The man fell down bonelessly, eyes already closed.

"Thank you, Hawkeye, Synapse," Adam said acerbically as he rushed down to meet a third man. He let his body move instinctively, allowing it to form the poses that had been taught to him.

He slammed himself sideways into the man's torso. "But I—" His wrists were loose but sure, parrying the man's attacks, "—can take care—" his elbows engaged and quick, delivering most of his blows"—of myself!" Then, his elbows and palms struck out. Six rapid strikes in barely a second: arm, throat, rib, rib, arm, nose; and the man fell back down, bleeding and struggling for air.

Asgardian finished the sequence with an obnoxious pose.

"Kung Fu?" Hawkeye asked, turning back to give him an amused smile as she stepped over the man.

"Why not? It keeps the hands free for finger spells," Asgardian said, somewhat defensively.

"And really? _Synapse_? Asgardian suggested that name, didn't he?"

They were running down the stairs now and there was no one following or running up to challenge them. Synapse had Cassie's arm slung over her shoulder, face deep in concentration as she worked on accelerating Cassie's recovery.

They burst out of the door and found themselves on the northern side of the hospital. In the distance was the tree line of the surrounding forest and in front was a small army of doctors, nurses and patients, all holding scalpels, syringes, and even drip stands for weapons.

"Shit," Hawkeye muttered, as she reached to her back for the gun that wasn't there.

"I fucking knew it," Asgardian said, as he threw away his bracelet. "Leave your weapons behind, he said." His hands and fingers were flexing immediately, crafting the Forms in quick snaps. "It will be safe, he said." With a final thrust, he swept his arms across the space in front of him and heaved a mighty exhale. But instead of the windstorm that should have blown off the throng, he felt the spell fizzle in his hands and a brisk—but ultimately harmless—gale confronted them instead. "What the…" he said out loud, staring at his impotent hands in disbelief.

Then something huge shot out from above him, extending to one side of the mob and then sweeping them to the other side with one slide of a giant hand.

"Ugh!" Stature groaned out in a deep voice, as she shrank down and fell to her knees. Most of her clothes had been reduced to tatters, enough of it that Agardian had to look away. "I haven't done that in a while."

He took off his shirt and passed it over.

"Come on," Synapse said as she grabbed the shirt and draped it on Cassie's body. "We're almost there."

They ran around the building and to the foyer, where Iron Lad was already in his suit, hovering in front of Eli and a stunned Sami and blasting at the rabid group pouring out of the hospital entrance.

"We're here!" Asgardian cried out. He tore the collar off his neck and sent a bolt of lightning to the three men who had managed to slip through Iron Lad's attacks.

Iron Lad turned his head toward them, metal mask creasing into a frown when he saw Asgardian's half-naked body leading the charge. "Are you going to teleport us out?"

"I—" Asgardian made the Forms experimentally and felt the magic sputter and fall apart. "No, I don't think so. My magic's down."

"I got it," Hawkeye said. She took a small black object out of her pocket and pressed, looking at the sky expectantly. "Oh, shit!" she said. "Guys, hold out for a minute!"

The four of them fell to a shield formation in front of Sami, Eli, and Cassie. Synapse and Hawkeye took the first line of defense, supported by Iron Lad and Asgardian a few paces behind.

More and more people spilled out of the front doors, some crawling out of the windows and others piling in from the side wings of the hospital, each frothing at the mouth and brandishing some makeshift weapon.

"Holy fuck," Synapse muttered in front of him, as she adopted a basic combat stance.

Asgardian extended an arm forward and over her shoulder, aiming his palm at the thickest knot in the gathering mass. "Don't worry," he said, unleashing forked streaks of lightning. "I got you."

The air burned with the scent of ozone and chlorine as his lightning and Iron Lad's plasma blasts ripped through the crowd, devastating large swaths in quick intermittent bursts. What few that managed to get through were quickly dealt with by Synapse and Hawkeye before they could make it to Iron Lad and Asgardian. They held out for a few minutes before he was panting and Synapse began moving sluggishly.

Just as he thought he would pass out, a shadow suddenly fell around them as Hawkeye's ship materialized a few yards above, generating neither sound nor wind. Hawkeye pointed the transmitter at the hospital gate, away from the advancing horde, and the ship followed the motion and landed.

"Go, go, go!" she cried out as everyone else ran for the lowering ramp.

Hawkeye and Iron Lad stayed behind to cover the retreat, with Iron Lad taking out as many attackers as he could with his blast guns and Hawkeye shielding him from those that trickled through. She was deadly even without her guns, Asgardian noted as he climbed up the ship, but she was still taking some blows whenever too many men got through at once.

"We're clear!" he shouted at them once Eli and Cassie had been carried up to the cabin. He turned and saw that Ruixian was already at the controls, quickly executing an elaborate sequence of button-pressing, switch-flicking, and lever-pulling. There was a soft vibration under his feet and the ramp began to close.

"And we're off!" Iron Lad shouted as he dove to grab Hawkeye under the armpits. In one smooth arc, he flew for the ship, slipped through the closing gap of the ramp, and landed on the deck, just behind the captiain's chair.

"Thanks," Hawkeye said when Iron Lad finally put her down. "Synapse, you got this?"

"Yeah," Synapse replied, giving her a thumbs up over the shoulder.

The ship started climbing and Asgardian swayed uneasily on his feet, falling wearily onto one of the cabin chairs. He let his face fall in his palms as he caught his breath.

"That man back there," Synapse went on. "In the stairwell. When I used my powers on him… He felt… strange."

"Strange, how?" Iron Lad asked, taking off his mask.

"His body… I don't know, it felt wrong. Like it was _changed_. In a cellular level."

"We have to go to the rest of the Avengers," Hawkeye said instantly. "Set a course for New—"

"No," Iron Lad insisted. "The speedster comes first."

"My ship, my rules!" Hawkeye snapped. "And how do you know about the speedster?"

In his exhaustion, Asgardian tuned them out. He looked around him and considered their little party for the first time: an Avenger-wannabe mutant runaway on the wheel, an actual Avenger arguing with a time-traveling future despot who was also an ex-Avenger, two more ex-Avengers lying semi-comatose on the floor, and a shell-shocked Inhuman staring blankly at the ship's metal ceiling as he desperately clutched the suppression collar on his neck.

Oh, and how could he forget the impossible mutant-mage who was also an ex-Avenger, Heir Supreme, and wielder of Chaos? And… and now they were on their way to find the lost child of two dead Avengers who might also be his—what? soul-parents? Or maybe they'd go to New York to join forces with the actual Avengers… And what about the cosmic abomination running around in Eli's old suit? What now? Who fucking knew what to do now?

He began to laugh hysterically at the hopelessness of it all, loud and unrestrained until tears filled his eyes and his body shook with tremors. "Hey guys," he managed to say in between sobs. "Look!" He spread his arms dramatically, trailing his eyes from Iron Lad and Hawkeye in the cockpit to Eli and Cassie unconscious on the cabin floor. "The mighty Young Avengers, reunited!"

He threw his head back and laughed again, tears streaming down his face.


	5. Teddy

**Teddy**

A frosty quiet spilled over the French Alps. A half-moon, in its lofty seat in the sky, hid its face in a veil of wispy clouds and turned away from the Earth in shame. There might have been a wind—certainly no snow or hail, for the sky was sparse with clouds—but the ship's interior was warm and comfortable, though the mood was just as gloomy.

The deck had been refashioned into something of a war room. A central round section of the floor had been elevated by four sliding rods to make a table and ten rounded stools had been similarly raised. Of these ten, six were presently occupied. Their seventh—Eli—was on a cot, immobile and oblivious, and drooling quietly in his sleep. At least he _seemed_ asleep.

"Did you find anything?" Hawkeye was asking Synapse, as they shared a large mug of coffee between them.

Synapse slowly shook her head and placed her hands on the table. "Very little. For the most part, the Sanctuaire was just a refuge. There were some signs of internal politics and that general air of creepiness that we all felt but I found nothing outright sinister."

"Did you manage to infiltrate the Main House?"

"Yes."

There was a soft rustle to her side as Sami stirred at the mention of his beloved Sanctuaire. He was slumped over the table, head buried in his arms like an ostrich hiding its head in the ground, and when he turned to look up at her, his face was the very picture of abject misery. "You broke in the Main House?" he croaked out, bloodshot eyes peering through disheveled hair as he rolled the thin chain of his suppression collar between his fingers with casual fondness. There was still the trace of an affected smile on his face, which made him look all the more pitiful.

"We're way past that now, Sami." Synapse smiled at him gently. She placed a hand on his shoulder, no doubt to calm him with her powers, and turned back to Hawkeye. "What's our next move?"

And didn't that just stab Adam in the fucking chest... Why was she asking _Hawkeye_ for directions?

The Avenger sighed and pressed her fingers against her temples, rubbing deep circles into the flesh. "I don't know. I think we should head to New York. Kang thinks we should look for the speedster." She paused and flicked her eyes to Adam. "What do you think, Asgardian?" she asked, almost pleadingly.

"Faketriot," Adam said without missing a beat.

"Of course. Let's not forget _that_ little problem. But we're being pulled in three directions here. Unless we split up—"

"No!" Adam and Iron Lad exclaimed together, the latter actually slamming a fist on the table.

"No, of course not. Because of reasons," Hawkeye said with another sigh. She picked up her mug and took a big gulp.

"Yes, reasons, very good ones," Iron Lad said from across the table, with a resolute hardness to his face. He had an arm wrapped protectively around Cassie, who seemed to have been somewhat restored if still a little pale. It unnerved Adam to see that the boy had remained so young and unchanged, especially when juxtaposed to Cassie, who now had more than five years on him. "I might be able to shed some light on your Fauxtriot problem."

"Faketriot," Synapse insisted.

Iron Lad rolled his eyes. "Whatever it is, it's a foreign entity."

"We already know that," Synapse said. Beside her, Adam brought his hands to a slow clap as he directed a look of pure disdain at Iron Lad.

"I don't think you do," the boy said, frowning quizzically at Adam's open hostility. "You think you let it in, don't you?"

Adam crossed his arms and continued glaring.

"Well, you didn't. It appeared over twenty-five years ago. It was just waiting."

"Twenty-five years?" Cassie asked weakly. "That's about as old as us."

"Yup." Iron Lad nodded excitedly, searching the faces around the table as if to look for approval. "Well, you guys anyway. To be more exact, as old as you." He fixed Adam an unwavering stare. "To the date."

"Wait. Are you saying that Faketriot's the speedster?" Hawkeye asked.

"No, no, no." Iron Lad shook his head emphatically. "He's a… well, the answer to that question is long and sad." He glanced back at Adam, his brown eyes suddenly soft and full of sympathy, and then looked around the table again. "Shall I?"

Everyone stared blankly back at him, even Cassie, who twisted her head to look at him with mistrustful eyes, and then turned to each other to share looks of uncertainty. When the silence had finally strained too much, it was Hawkeye who cleared her throat and shrugged. "We're not obligated to believe you but what the hell. Give it a shot."

Iron Lad grinned. "Good enough." He made a gesture with his hands and his metal gloves parted open and fell to the table with a loud hiss.

"Geez, relax!" he yelped, holding up his hands as he stared down the barrel of Hawkeye's gun, so quickly drawn that Adam hadn't even seen where it had come from. "My hands were starting to sweat!"

"Don't—" Hawkeye began, closing her eyes and heaving an exasperated exhale. "Don't make sudden movements." She withdrew her hand and replaced the gun under the table.

"Kate," Synapse said with a disapproving shake of her head.

"What?" Hawkeye blinked innocently. She turned back to Iron lad and said, "Sorry. Now, _please_ , continue."

"R-right," Iron Lad muttered, giving her a sidelong glance. "Well, really, the story begins with the Witch."

"The _Scarlet_ Witch?" Sami asked, perking up.

"Yes, the very same. One of the most powerful mages of her time and then the only user of Chaos magic." Here, he leveled Adam another stare. "A heroine and an Avenger until she killed half her team and almost razed Manhattan to the ground. That was about… fifteen years ago, I think? It was a dark day for the Avengers and the rest of the world."

"And then she vanished. Everyone was looking for her," Synapse said, giving Adam a careful glance. "Some still are."

"A hero turned villain, you'd think people would want to know why. Everyone wanted to bring her to justice, of course—or to exact vengeance of some kind because these days those two things are practically the same thing. But few cared to know what happened to her or even wondered how someone who had spent her entire life risking herself to protect people turned to killing thousands."

"She went insane," Cassie said, closing her eyes. There was a sudden look of pain on her face and her grip tightened visibly on Iron Lad's metal sleeve. "Everyone knows that."

"She didn't snap without a reason, Cassie," Iron Lad murmured as he gently stroked her fingers. "There was a reason." He turned to Hawkeye and waited for her expectantly.

"The records make no mention of a cause," she said, without hint of any emotion on her smooth face.

"Of course not. It was one of those shameful things that the Avengers liked to pretend didn't happen," Nate said, a soft smile pulling on his lips. "The truth is the Avengers wronged her."

Adam felt his skin prickle. "What do you mean?"

"After her marriage to the Vision, the Witch gave birth to a pair of sons—twins. You and the speedster, there's no point tiptoeing around that now."

"Impossible," Cassie said, frowning. She pulled away from Iron Lad and studied his face. "The Vision was a remarkable synthezoid but he couldn't have had children."

"I agree with Cassie," Adam said. "And for the record, no magic—Form or Chaos—can create life. Not one that has a soul like a human, anyway. She probably just had an affair. It's a small team and it isn't like my moth—the Witch had a lot of time to meet men with functional gonads. There was plenty of cross-pollination in the old team; it's a well-known fact."

"Ewe," Ruixian muttered to his side, even as Hawkeye snorted.

"Everything you said is correct," Iron Lad said. "Except for one part: the Witch _was_ faithful to her husband, that much is true."

"All right," Hawkeye conceded, raising a hand in Adam's direction just as he was about to argue again. "Suppose that what you say it's true, so what happened next?"

"Well, Cassie had already pointed it out. The Vision couldn't have had children and yet the Witch _did_ get pregnant. That should have tipped off the Avengers, don't you think? And I suppose it did, to some extent. Stark and Cap felt something was off but nobody wanted to cast aspersions on the Witch's happiness—"

"Lest in turn she cast her wrath on them," Sami said, smirking.

"Well, yeah, I suppose. Though, they were also _friends—_ " he said the word with some acidity "—so by the time they figured out that she had fashioned the twins out of Mephisto's soul, it was too late."

" _Mephisto's_ soul?" Adam said, dumbfounded. "A _demonic_ soul?" He was not a good person, he would admit that. He might even say outright that he was a bad person. But surely, he was not _demonic_ … right? "She wouldn't have dared."

"I suspect it was subconscious," Iron Lad said, with an apologetic smile and a noncommittal shrug.

"So what happened? Did the Avengers fail to defeat Mephisto?" Synapse asked. She laid hand on Adam's forearm and traced soothing circles with her thumb. "Is that why she went insane?"

Iron Lad's smile disappeared. "Worse," he said, voice hard and grim. "They _let_ him win."

"What?" Hawkeye said. Her body tightened as she leaned forward in his direction. "I don't believe you."

Iron Lad slowly shook his head. "Mephisto is an archdemon. Fighting him would have risked thousands of lives. And Stark—ever the libertarian that he was—argued that Mephisto was only after what was his by right; they were fragments of _his soul_ after all. If there were one human right Stark would respect, it would be the right to property. So the Avengers let Mephisto take the twins and found a way to make the Witch forget."

"Made her forget, how?"

"By magic of course."

Hawkeye fell back to her seat, her shoulders slumping forward and a hollowness filling her eyes. She reached for her mug with a trembling hand but it froze halfway and closed into a fist. "Liar," she whispered, though it wasn't clear to whom she was referring. "They were just babies."

"Come on, Kate," Iron Lad said, face twisting into something that might be melancholy or self-pity. "You can't honestly think the Avengers don't play heroism by the numbers? They sacrificed _me_ too, if you remember? They want me to become Kang, to become the monster I'd fought years fighting, so that the greater good could be served." He paused, looking suddenly thoughtful. "Huh. Do you realize that the idea of a greater good is only ever conjured when men are preparing to commit some unspeakable crime? I suppose nothing leads to great evil as readily as the greater good."

Her eyes flicked up to meet his, cold and vicious and steadfast. "Get on with your story."

"Right," Iron Lad said; he had a frenzied look in his eye, as if he had just emerged triumphant. "Long story short: the loss of her children, the Avengers' betrayal, and the weight of the memory spell broke her mind and eventually drove her insane. Well, you know, the thing about memory magic, as I understand, is that it's forbidden for a reason. It's incredibly volatile and has a… corrupting effect on everything it touches. I'm sure _you_ feel it, _Adam Thorne_." He turned to him and frowned, tilting his head to one side. "That's not even your real name is it? Do you even remember? No? I suppose not. Price of magic and all that; you know you've lost something but you don't know what it is. All you have left is the memory of a memory… How poignant is that?"

Adam grew cold at the way the boy was looking at him. Though he had not aged like the rest of them, Iron Lad seemed to be the most changed; there was something unsettling in how he confronted Adam—not quite malice or glee but it lacked the warmth that the boy used to have. The way he was studying Adam… it was as if Adam wasn't a person but a problem that must be dealt with.

He knew at once that he couldn't trust Iron Lad and decided that he would keep a close eye on him. And though the hair on his arms stood on end and his skin prickled, he kept his face blank and gave a dismissive shrug in response.

"But you feel it, right? It's more than just your name that you've lost. You're changing, aren't you? You're just… not _you_ anymore."

"You seem to know a lot about memory magic," Adam said.

"I've learned many things in the time stream, Heir Supreme," Iron Lad retorted, without the coldness that Adam had expected. He paused for a while, chewed on his lip, and then turned back to Hawkeye. "So after the Witch rained vengeance on the Avengers, she tried to bring her children back. Form… Chaos… She tried everything. But like Adam said, there's no magic than can create a soul. It was beyond the ability of even one as powerful as the Scarlet Witch. The more she tried, the deeper it drove her into the abyss of madness. At some point, she rewrote the whole world in her father's image. A mutant utopia where her sons existed, soulless empty shells though they were. Mere echoes of the children that she had lost to the Avengers' betrayal. But she was happy, even though she knew that it wasn't real. But of course, the spell broke at some point, because if there's one thing the Avengers are good at, it's saving and breaking the world. So they broke hers to save theirs. Now humans are once again free to oppress and subjugate mutants because you can save the world but god forbid you actually try to _change_ it for the better."

A sullen silence had befallen the room. These were ancient sins that Iron Lad was unearthing, a stain that the Avengers had sought to keep secret. He had no proof, no evidence to offer but Adam knew, and everyone else did too, that the boy who would become Kang was telling the truth.

"And now we come to you, Adam Thorne," Iron Lad went on, though not unkindly. "When her spell broke and the world was remade in its original flavor of crappy—mutant oppression and all—her sons were somehow recreated here. _You_ , who were the Witch's sons, now born to other families. And more surprisingly, Scarlet Heir, _with souls of your own._ No demonic homunculus or magical trickery but your own true souls, indistinguishable from a real—sorry, I meant _conventional_ human soul. Two souls created out of nothing. An impossibility, as you've said."

Adam lifted his eyes from the table and said weakly, "I don't know what you're accusing me of."

Iron Lad shook his head and gave a soft smile. "I don't know either." He shrugged. "I think you're quite faultless at this, to be honest. And it's incredible! An immaculate birth. If this had happened two thousand years ago, they'd have built a religion around you." He looked around the table with a grin, which faltered when he was met with unimpressed faces and a stony silence.

"Well, I think you're quite remarkable, Adam," Cassie said, turning to Adam with an apologetic look.

"Thanks," Adam muttered, suppressing the urge to roll his eyes.

"Sorry, I still don't get how this is related to the Faketriot," Synapse interjected, throwing her an apologetic glance.

"Well, something else appeared that day. Something that wasn't supposed to be there," Iron Lad said.

"The Faketriot, then?"

"No, not yet. This was something else. _Someone_ else. Someone _you_ made, Adam." Iron Lad slowly turned his eyes to Adam, eyes which, to Adam's surprise, were filled with sadness. "Do you remember him?"

 _Teddy. His name was Teddy_. _Teddy. His name was Te—fuck!_

"No, I-I—" Adam buried his head in his hands and tangled his fingers in his hair. "No, I don't." He closed his eyes and pulled at his hair. There was a throbbing pain in his skull but he was sure that if he pulled hard enough, he could wrench it out.

"I don't remember him either," Iron Lad said. "And I'm immune to changes to the timeline. Whatever took him is powerful if it can screw with the time stream like that."

He kept on talking but the words disappeared under a buzzing sound in Adam's head. The name fought back, deciding it would be denied no more and yet the word was hard on Adam's throat, stuck in his larynx like something was pulling it back. His throat burned with the effort of speaking it out loud.

"Teddy," Adam managed with considerable relief, panting and sweating. "His name was Teddy."

The pain in his head disappeared instantly, replaced instead by an emptiness that spread through him like a creeping coldness. His hands fell away from his hair and he released a shuddering sigh, his shoulders slumping forward as he folded into himself. When he looked up, he saw everyone staring at him.

 _I made Teddy_.

And his heart broke at the thought.

"Ah, Teddy," Iron Lad said. "Okay. So you do remember something."

"Who is Teddy?" Hawkeye asked.

"A boy whom Adam dreamed up. He had been a Young Avenger, with us, and then something took him away."

"Oh... Adam..."

And he could hear the twin tones of disapproval and sympathy in her voice.

"I didn't know," he said, breaking away from everyone's pitying gaze. "I didn't know. I thought he was real." He closed his eyes and took deep breaths, willing away the tears.

"You were in love with him," Sami said quietly, turning his head on the table to stare up at Adam.

"Were you?" Synapse asked. And when her voice came, it was tender and jealous and heartbroken.

Adam tipped his head and let the hair fall over his eyes "I was," he said, blinking back the tears now threatening to spill.

 _I am. God, I still am._

"Do you remember him?"

"I have no memories of him", he said. "But I remember loving him. I-I…"

 _The love I have for him remains, even without my memory of him._ Grief without memory. Affection without object. A hopeless impotent frustration that grew heavy with unspent force. Like a pent-up spell that failed at the last moment of casting—or perhaps the edge of a denied orgasm.

There was a short silence and nobody tried to berate or console him. Outside, the wind was howling, skidding across the ship's skin with a susurrus sound. Everything had taken on a bleary quality, like he was in a dream, and even the sound of conversation sounded distant and muffled. With considerable effort, he forced himself to focus and listened to the rest of the conversation in a daze.

"He existed for about twenty-five years before something tore him away from the universe," Iron Lad went on. "Usually, when something like this happens, when a thing that wasn't supposed to be here disappears, the universe manages to fix the damage to the timeline rather easily. It rewrites itself so that no important events are changed despite the entity's removal. It's not all that rare, to be honest; people and things sometimes just fall out of the timeline for various reasons. But this Teddy… he's holding on. Or something is pulling him back from whatever it is that's trying to remove him. So the wound can't completely close."

 _Me_. _I'm pulling back. I'm the one fighting whatever it is that wants to take Teddy away._

"You don't know why he disappeared?" Hawkeye asked.

"I don't."

"And you don't know who's responsible either."

"I don't either."

Hawkeye released a long-suffering sigh. "How will you fulfill your destiny as time-travelling mass-murderer if you can't even figure out who your enemies are?"

"Kate!" Cassie exclaimed, fixing her a glare.

"Wha—"

"It's a scar," Synapse interjected. "The Faketriot is a scar."

"You're right," Iron Lad said, ignoring Hawkeye's provocations (though the hardness seemed to have resettled on his face). "Metaphorically speaking, the Faketriot behaves like a scar. It's cauterizing the wound to the timeline by forcing key players—us, those who had been closest to Teddy—to make certain events happen. Events that originally happened because of Teddy and that now should happen _despite_ the absence of Teddy."

"Am I right to say that finding the speedster is one of these events?"

Iron Lad gave a curt nod. "Correct. The second one. The first is Eli. He was never supposed to fall in so deep. With Teddy, the Young Avengers managed to save him before the MGH started taking a toll on his body."

"So we fix him," Hawkeye said. "How do you suppose we do that?"

"Well," Iron Lad said, his eyes trailing away and finding Synapse's.

" _I_ fix him," she said bitterly. "The mutant fixes the MGH addict."

Hawkeye turned and leveled her a frown.

"What?" Synapse demanded hotly, glaring back. "I'll do it, all right? But there's no reason to sugarcoat the irony here."

"He was just a kid," Hawkeye said.

"So was I. Still am, if you haven't noticed." She spread her arms to her sides, as if to present her body for Hawkeye's inspection.

They stared each other down for a long second until Cassie finally broke the silence.

"And after Eli and the speedster?" she asked, throwing Synapse a sympathetic half-smile.

"I don't know," Iron Lad admitted. "I'm not done with the calculations yet. It took me months just to isolate these two events."

A frown creased between her eyebrows. "How many are there?"

"I'm not sure. Three or four, I think."

"So at least now we know something. Faketriot and the speedster are the same problem." Hawkeye was tapping on the table with her forefinger, making an intermittent clicking sound. "What if we can't fix the timeline? What's going to happen?"

"Time runs out," Iron Lad said with a yawn.

"Which means?"

"It's hard to explain without delving into the mathematics of time travel; it's all equations. But to put it in the bluntest and simplest way: the timeline will bleed out at the wound. All lives that had been touched by Teddy would be irrevocably and grotesquely changed. And then those changes will ripple outward, backward and forward in the time stream in a chaotic and unpredictable manner, corrupting past, present, future, and even other realities. It would be catastrophic."

"You've already done some projections on that, haven't you?" Hawkeye said.

Iron Lad nodded gravely. "Two billion lives. That's the damage, for this universe alone. Two billion lives unborn. And many more plunged in suffering."

 _All because of me_. The sins of the mother repeated by the son. The creation of a life that was not supposed to be. Magic was the violation of the rules of the universe but _this…_ This was impossible. This was blasphemy.

"There's no way," Adam found himself saying, breaking the stupor that had settled on his mind. "No magic can create a soul. Life, maybe, but not a soul. Even then, the price would be astronomical. Cosmic."

"You said it was impossible, not expensive," Hawkeye said, the bile in her voice tempered only slightly with pity.

"Life, maybe, but a soul… a true human soul…" Adam repeated, wide eyes training on hers. He was on his feet now, he realized, and the equations were running hot and quick in his head. "There's no way to negotiate the rules to create a soul. The way magic works, it just isn't possible."

"And yet here you are," Sami said with a flick of his wrist. "And your boytoy wherever it is he might be. Which magic community college did you go to again?"

"What about those people in the Sanctuaire?" Cassie asked before Adam could snap at Sami. "Are they part of this time stream problem?"

Iron Lad brought a hand to his chin and spoke slowly. "I don't know."

Adam huffed out in annoyance and ran his fingers through his hair. It was greasy and knotted and flakes of dandruff fell as he pulled away. "When I was looking for Ruixian," he started. "I met a spirit. She said that there was an infection spreading among humans. Mutants, Inhumans, everyone. A disease no spirit has ever seen."

Sami scoffed and pushed himself up the table to sit up straight. "Impossible. The Sanctuaire has a very strict screening policy for all sorts of maladies. Anything that presents a biochemical change _is_ detected. We are, after all, first and foremost, a hospital." His chest puffed out and his nose lifted, as if in pride. There was even the hint of his signature Sami smile returning to his lips.

"And that just confirms that the pathogen must be something new," Hawkeye concluded. "The Inhuman monarchy. Ted told me. You think it's connected?"

Adam shrugged. "I don't know. Could be."

"The Inhumans did not exhibit any signs of rabidity or aggression though."

"It might work differently for Inhumans," Synapse suggested. "Or mutants. I've never seen or read anything like it."

"Should we be worried then?" Sami asked. "I'm fine now," he insisted as he waved away Synapse's hand, having been reanimated by sudden panic.

"That we're infected?" Cassie asked, turning to look at Iron Lad.

"Not likely. I ran a scan on everyone after Synapse said she'd detected a biological change in the attackers," he said. "But without knowing what exactly to test for, I can't be certain that the pathogen isn't just dormant. We should look out for each other."

A short pause, as everyone let the pieces of the puzzle fall into place and took time to absorb everything. Adam dropped back in his chair.

"So what do we do now?" Cassie asked meekly, her head falling back on Iron Lad's shoulder.

"We save the world," he said, grinning boyishly as he leaned down and planted a chaste kiss on her forehead.

Save the world. Right. Where had Adam heard that before? It all seemed so… _colossal_ now. But at least, now with everything on the table and properly fitted into place, they had a place to start. A way to systematically hack away at the problem.

"I've already relayed a report on the infection to the Avengers. Let them take care of that. We'll deal with the speedster, Faketriot, and hopefully the Seven as well. Since the speedster is connected to the Seven, perhaps they'd be part of the Teddy thing too," Hawkeye said, pointedly _not_ looking at Adam. "Iron Lad, do you have any leads on the speedster?"

"Please," he replied with some measure of derision. "I'm a time traveller. I have all the leads."

Hawkeye rolled her eyes. "Well, let's have it then," she said, reaching for her coffee. She seemed to have returned to her usual self, now that they had a clear line of action. "What do you have, time traveller?"

"I have his last known location."

Adam allowed himself a smile that he didn't feel yet. "Nice."

"Yeah, no..." Iron Lad said, flushing. "It's from seven years ago."

"So you're telling us," Synapse began, "that you know where he was _seven years ago_?"

"God, I think I prefer Kang," Hawkeye muttered, earning her a pinch on the arm from Cassie.

"Well, it's the best I could do, okay?" Iron Lad said hotly. He folded his arms over his chest and pouted. "The guy's shielded after that point in the timeline."

"What do you mean ' _shielded_ '?" Hawkeye asked,

"He disappeared from the time stream. Like he just stopped existing seven years ago. Someone wanted him hidden and did a very good job."

Hawkeye brought a hand to her chin, forehead creasing as she deliberated on something. "It seems someone's pulling the strings behind our little speedster," she said after some time. "Where's your lead, then?"

* * *

Adam made it to the toilet just as he started heaving. He hadn't eaten anything that day, so nothing came out. But it hurt all the same—perhaps even more—as his throat contracted in waves, expelling nothing but air, acid, and blood that somehow came out black. Once it had passed, he sat up against the wall and caught his breath, placing a clammy hand on his forehead and wiping the sweat pouring off him.

He cast a tired look around and took stock. Surrounding him on the cold metal floor were frayed bundles of herbs, candle stumps, and a small plastic cup that he had used to hold his blood. The contents had spilled on the floor some time ago, pooling over the runes that he had painstakingly etched on the metal floor and covering them with a thin film. It was all useless now, expended and unrecyclable, a hefty price paid for a pittance.

Still, it was something. A slight static crackled over his skin as the protective spell settled over him like a veil. It had taken him four attempts and nearly six hours just to get it right but it worked—it might not stop a bullet or even a knife, but it might deflect a half-hearted punch if the angle were _just_ right.

It worked.

 _And thank fuck just for that_. Because that meant that magic wasn't completely broken yet and he could still fix it. He wouldn't take the Supremacy—he couldn't, anyway, not when he was still Adam Thorne—but he'd find a way so no one else had to die because of him.

So now he laughed breathlessly, despite the stabbing pain in his side and the black spots popping in his vision.

 _It worked; it actually fucking worked_ , he thought to himself.

He gestured a quick one-handed Form, a simple one that had no purpose but to diffract light into a pretty multicolored ribbon. It didn't work. So he tried again, and again, and again, modifying the Form slightly with each try and laughing to himself every time it failed.

"You can do this," he told himself. "If you can create a fucking person, you can—"

He cut himself off with a strangled cry, his heart seizing in a soundless sob.

 _Teddy…_

His hand fell uselessly to his side as his body began shaking uncontrollably, his chest heaving and his stomach contracting until he found himself leaning back over the toilet and vomiting black goop.

His thoughts came to him confused and haphazard, running and tripping over each other.

 _I created Teddy… kind, beautiful, golden Teddy with thoughts and emotions and a fucking soul and now he's lost and all alone because I wasn't strong enough to keep him here—or to never have created him at all!_

He raised his hand and made the useless Form again. Nothing happened but it was important, he knew, so he kept at it.

And then, perhaps on his hundredth attempt, something broke and gave way; the space before him lit up in a shimmering brilliance, a wavering translucent curtain of light that swayed slowly in midair. It served as a sort of litmus test to check a place for anything that might warp, diminish, or magnify the effects of magic, and it would normally be opalescent, a psychedelic kaleidoscopic explosion of colors in the fashion of a borealis. But instead it was just a swirling mist of blue and gold, which, somehow, appeared more beautiful than what he had intended. Yet despite that, the sight plunged him deeper in despair, not simply for the brokenness of magic but for a significance to a memory that he couldn't remember. He began to cry, even as he continued laughing, his other hand pressed hard against his forehead while tears flowed freely down his cheeks. The borealis waved and shifted above him, casting a soft glorious light on the sickly pallor of his skin.

But it was a minor spell, short-lived, meant more to impress than anything, and it eventually dulled and extinguished itself.

So Adam did it again, and again, and again, even as blood began to drip down his nose and his stomach threatened to heave, tracing glittering streaks in the air until his eyes were blind and he could see nothing but blue and gold... again, and again, and again, until his wrist hurt, his fingers cramped, and he could make the Form no more.

* * *

 _He was cold. But Teddy was beside him, the warmth of his body pressing against Billy even through their thick winter coats. Above them, the sky was an explosion of stars, like a map, hiding behind the veil of an aurora borealis._

 _"You didn't tell me," Billy said, his voice breaking as the words finally left his lips. He kept his eyes fixed forward, knowing he couldn't bear to look at the boy who never was._

 _His breath frosted in the chill air, white and ghostly and dissipating… a dream vanished in the light of day. "I made you."_

 _He didn't know what to expect, what answer Teddy would give him, so it was well that Teddy remained silent, though that too became agonizing at some point._

 _"Why didn't you tell me?" he asked, in the wake of this unbearable silence._

 _Teddy's hand separated from his and as Teddy stepped away, leaving Billy feeling alone and cold, his heart filled with conviction. Funny, he didn't even realize that Teddy had been holding his hand._

 _"I imagined you." Tears burned his eyes. "And you didn't tell me."_

 _A strong hand—heavy and solid and so deceptively real—closed around his wrist and twirled him around until he came face to face with Teddy. Beautiful, golden, imaginary Teddy._

 _"Look at me, Billy," Teddy said, voice hard with desperation. "Do you feel this?" His hand tightened around Billy's wrist, firm but not painful. His breath touched Billy's skin, transient and vanishing. Like a ghost._

I'm here, I'm here _, his blue eyes screamed._ Feel me, feel how real I am.

 _"I made you!" Billy cried out, pulling away with such force that he slipped and fell, crushing the perfect snow under one knee._

 _"Billy," Teddy said weakly. It seemed that it was all he could say now, as he gently held Billy by the arms and lifted him to his feet. "Look at me," he murmured in a pained voice. "Please."_

 _Billy didn't. Instead, he closed his eyes and kept them shut, trying his best to ignore the arms enclosing him._

 _And then Teddy said it. He said the last words that Billy wanted to hear in that moment._

 _"I love you."_

 _"No!" Billy shrieked. His body moved against his will, shaking and thrashing violently to break Teddy's hold on him. "Let go of me!"_

 _"I love you," Teddy said again, tightening his arms around Billy._

 _"Get away from me!"_

 _"Please, Billy," Teddy pleaded, and Billy could feel a wetness spreading on his temple now, where Teddy had pressed his face. "You're all I have."_

 _"You're not real!" Billy screamed against the flurry falling of snow._

 _There was a moment, a perfect crystalline silence when the world stilled, each atom and falling snowflake turning to watch. Teddy's arms went slack and fell away._

 _"I love y—"_

 _With a final burst of resistance, Billy shoved Teddy away with all his strength, hard enough that the other boy slipped and fell to the ground on his back._

 _They stared at each other, both in stunned silence. Teddy was splayed on the snow, hands and feet pressed down for support and his scarf hanging limp to one side with its knot undone._

 _Billy took a step and offered his hand. "I'm sorry, I didn't—"_

 _But the look on the other boy's face kept him away. Teddy stared back, blue eyes wide with the shock of heartbreak._

 _Memory came to Billy in a rush, painful not in their usual way that made his head throb. But painful like the ache that came with the cold of snow, the ache of something treasured—like heat—leaving his body._

 _How many times had he seen Teddy fall to the ground? How many times had he seen the boy he loved struggle to stand up, panting and trembling, so that he could keep on fighting even as his body failed him? How many times did he force himself to his feet, bloody but unbroken, with a defiant sneer on his lips? How many times?_

Always _, the voice of memory answered for him._

Always. For you.

 _But now Teddy would not get up. He was rooted to the ground, wet and cold, unable to move a muscle._

 _Billy took another step and Teddy jerked back instinctively, away from Billy, eyes widening with fear as if he were afraid that Billy would hurt him._

 _There was a sudden gust, kicking up the snow in a fierce blizzard, and then, just as abruptly, it was gone. Billy was alone and the world was quiet and white and calm again. Snowflakes drifted about his legs, scudding along and caught in a draft, and the cold began to seep through his clothes._

 _Before him, the snow was smooth and unbroken..._ _pristine and undisturbed, as if Teddy had never been there at all._


	6. Brother

**Brother**

Dawn broke over the gleaming city of Singapore, harsh and glaring with all the punitive aggression of a hangover. It sparkled something like a metal toy that had been dropped carelessly in a tub and Adam watched it all with cold apathy from the co-pilot seat in the cockpit.

"Hey," someone said, bumping a shoulder against his.

"Hey," he muttered, softly and and half-heartedly. He turned and saw that it was Ruixian. "Who's flying?"

"Kate."

He looked to the seat to his left and, indeed, saw the Avenger. Then, shrugging weakly, he turned away indifferently and stared out the windshield again. They were flying rather close to the surface of the sea, low enough that Adam could see the undulation of heavy waves crawling their way to the island in the distance.

"So," Ruixian spoke again, in that irritating way she did when she didn't know well enough to keep quiet and leave him alone. "Singapore."

"Yep."

"Been a long time." She sat on the armrest to his right and ran a hand through his hair.

"Sure have."

A beat of silence. He didn't miss the subtle sweep of electricity through his body as she looked him over. But he didn't mind. He was in a foul mood and he didn't want to talk. He wanted her to go away and if checking him without permission could catalyze that outcome, then she could have at it. But what did he care if she stayed anyway? In fact, it didn't matter. She could stay or go. Let her fill the silence if she wanted to talk. Whatever.

"So," she said again.

"So."

"You wanna talk about it?"

"No."

He thought that would make her go away. But it didn't. Frustratingly loyal girl that she was, Ruixian stayed beside him, running her hand through his filthy hair as she hummed some Tracy Chapman song.

"I created him," he found himself saying. He kept his eyes forward, hard and focused on the gleaming city. "And then I fell in love with him. I mean how pathetic is that? I'm such a fucking idiot."

She waited for him to say more, patient and quiet with only the careful movement of her fingers through his hair to indicate that she was still there. When it became clear that he would add no more, she asked, "Did he love you too?"

And that was the crux of this existential conundrum, wasn't it? Did Teddy really love him? Or was he simply programmed that way—to befriend Adam and to fall in love with him? How could Adam ever be sure that the love Teddy professed wasn't just part of the spell that created him? Where was Teddy's choice in all this?

"I don't know," Adam said, after a long pause. "I don't even know if he has free will. What if he only loves me because I encoded that in his DNA or something? I mean is that even really love? What is love, if there's no free will?"

"I think falling in love isn't a choice," Ruixian murmured. Her hand froze in his hair for a moment before she withdrew it completely. "If it were, there'd be no broken hearts."

"I suppose," Adam said. "You think it's chance, then?"

"In a way."

Adam thought about it for a while. "I don't know which is worse."

"What is this, high school?" Ruixian said, a little irritably. She flicked his ear playfully, though it stung just a little. "You're asking what love is. Do you know how difficult it is to answer that?"

Adam shrugged, still refusing to look at her, and swept away a lock of hair that had fallen over his eye. "It needs to be answered."

Another pause. They were almost at the island now and the skyline had become more pronounced; in the distance, skyscrapers rose from the ocean and reached out like gray fingers against the pink backdrop of dawn.

 _Skyscraper—_ he always did like that word _…_ a structure so high, it scraped the sky. There was a certain romanticism to the imagery, and even a bit of hubris.

Kate had already put the ship on stealth mode and Adam could hear the bustle of activity behind him as Cassie and Nate prepared themselves for landing. Even Eli seemed excited; he was in a fit of frenzied spasming under the covers of his cot, his head whipping around as he muttered nonsense words at a bored-looking Sami, who could only stare back with vacuous uncaring eyes. Everyone, even Cassie, seemed to have given up on Sami. The Inhuman had not smiled in days and he seemed to prefer to spend his time sitting beside Eli, mumbling to himself in Hindi and French as he alternated between weeping in his hands and glaring at everyone. He would not eat or drink _—_ except for the bottle of whiskey that Kate had to wrestle away from him a few times _—_ and even though it was clear that he no longer cared to shower, he spent inordinate lengths of time in the bathroom. Ruixian might have helped but he wouldn't allow her anywhere near him anymore.

"So what are you gonna do?" Ruixian asked, scattering his thoughts.

"I don't know." Adam brought his legs up to the chair and wrapped his arms around his knees. "Do I _un_ make him to fix the time stream? Shit, I don't even know how to do that. And that would be murder, right? Or is that okay? Cos I'm like his god or something. Does that give me a pass?"

"Well, do you _want_ to unmake him?"

He turned to her now, desperate for someone who was _not_ him to come up with an answer, for someone else to make the decision for him. "No. But at this point, what I want matters less than what I need to do. Tell me, Ray. What should I do?"

She stared at him for a while, her dark brown eyes peering deep into him as her nimble mind grappled with the problem. "Do what you think is right," was her useless response.

"Well, what do _you_ think?" he asked with an expert roll of his eyes.

"I think," she said in a solemn voice. She picked a lock of his hair, rolled it between her fingers, and let it fall. "You look like shit."

Adam turned away and groaned. The girl never did have good timing. "Come on, Ray."

"Smell like it too," Kate said from the pilot seat, glancing over at him and wrinkling her nose. "Seriously, Adam, take a shower. We have about twenty minutes before we get to the coordinates that Nate gave me."

The girls laughed and the sound of it warmed him a little; it was a reminder: whatever it was that had to be done, he didn't have to do it alone. "Go away, you two," he said. "I was perfectly happy wallowing here on my own."

"Oh, and why did you never tell me?" Kate asked, in between fits of laughter.

"Tell you what?" Adam asked, as flatly as he could.

"That you're gay."

"Oh." Did he never tell her? He couldn't remember now. "It just never came up, I guess."

"So you're not bi?" Ruixian asked with a clear tone of disappointment.

"I am gay. Very _very_ gay. Like super gay."

"You should have told me," she said bitterly.

"Well now you know."

"It's time to change your codename, Adam," Kate said. And the way she spoke, it was clear that she was stifling another laugh.

"What's wrong with Asgar..." Adam's voice drifted off.

After a moment's pause, the girls howled together and his face burned a deep scarlet. And then, soon enough, despite the sinking feeling that clung inside his chest, he found himself smiling… even if just a little.

* * *

"Why are you even here?" Adam asked testily, loosening his scarlet robe around his neck. It was probably a poor choice to have worn it, since he was already sweating in the eternal summer of the sweltering Singapore sun, but with little magic to command, he needed all the protection he could get. (Also, it billowed out rather magnificently behind him and today, of all days, he thought the dramatics might lift his mood). "You could have stayed on the ship."

Iron Lad shook his head. "It happened this way the first time," he explained. "Don't wanna risk deviating from the plotted course. There. I think I found the entrance."

He pointed at a pair of metal doors, rusted over and pocked with what Adam suspected were indentations made by gunfire. True enough, there were shell casings scattered around the base, and the chaotic way they lay on the ground suggested that nobody had gone in the building since the Red Skull's invasion—at least not through _this_ door.

"So in this world where this Teddy person existed, the Avengers let you stay with us? You remained a Young Avenger?" Cassie asked offhandedly as she carefully pried open the door.

Iron Lad took the lead and stepped into the dark. He extended a forearm to his side and a thin planar beam of light swept across the room. "They didn't," he said, looking at the readings on his wrist. "But the math says I was here. Sort of. Some proxy for me, I think? I don't really understand how that's possible either so I think it might be a time paradox or something."

"You've got a long way to go, Kang," Hawkeye said as she stepped through the door, each hand gripping a gun.

"Hawkeye… come on…" Stature said, almost pleadingly.

To his credit, Iron Lad did not rise to the bait. Instead, he stepped forward and guided them through the long corridor of debris and metal scraps. It was dusty too and smelled of mildew and rotten meat and Adam could not shake off the sense of sacrilege at intruding on what was essentially a warzone—or a mass grave—which before that had also been a prison.

"What happened to the bow and arrow?" Stature asked perfunctorily, to break the silence.

"Too bulky and too slow," Hawkeye said curtly, without turning to look at her. She wasn't trying to be rude but it was obvious in her dismissive tone that she didn't wish to talk.

"I remember you always insisted on them."

"Like I said: too bulky and too slow. Last lesson I learned from Clint."

"Oh."

Nobody tried to make conversation after that. In silence, they passed by rows upon rows of open doors and aside from the obligatory check, nobody lingered too long at the doorways. Everyone knew the things that they would find inside and so it was well that Iron Lad had insisted that Ruixian stayed on the ship.

At the end of the corridor was another pair of metal doors, hanging at the hinges and flung inwards into what looked like a main office. Inside were papers strewn all over the floor, bits of broken ceramics, and chairs and lamps and other small pieces of furniture knocked over to their sides. There were large cabinets too—the kind one would find in the archives of a library or a police station—some partially open, almost everything packed with folders. Like the rest of the holding facility, the room exuded a look of age and dilapidation.

"It's here," Iron Lad declared. "These are all the records that survived. Singapore has very strict laws governing mutant experimentation so everything is either on paper or CD. Nothing is ever uploaded. For reasons of national security, of course."

Adam looked around and stared despairingly at the cabinets brimming with papers. "Can you find the file with your tech?" he asked despite already knowing the answer.

"Doesn't work like that, Asgardian," Iron Lad said as he pulled open a drawer and began flipping through the files. "My tech's not magic."

Hawkeye and Stature both turned imploringly to Adam, with a shared look of hope. But he could only return a shrug. "Magic doesn't work like that either," he lied.

He knew it could work—or rather, he could _make_ it work. He had been experimenting with fingerspells for the past few days and he had figured out the tricks and modifications to the Forms that could make just about any given spell work. And to supplement his fingerspells, he had derived a preliminary framework for string magic from the charm that Maria had taught him and he was armed (or wrapped, rather) to the tooth with all sorts of supportive charms to aid in his casting. But still, despite all that hard work and innovation, casting the modified Forms would be long and arduous and so exorbitant that he'd rather spend hours raking through the records on his own than to cast a simple location spell, which might cost anywhere from an hour of lost sleep to a literal pound of flesh. So long as he had no notion of this new exchange rate, he thought he'd better keep the magic to a minimum.

So with a defeated sigh, he turned to the nearest cabinet and began reading through the files.

Somewhere behind him, he heard the static of a walkie-talkie. With a groan of her own, Hawkeye muttered to the radio, "Settle down, Synapse. We'll be here for hours."

* * *

 _The main course came a little slow. And when it did, Teddy balked at the dish that was presented to him._

 _"What is this?" he asked, once the waiter was out of earshot. With a long silver fork, he poked suspiciously at a roasted cherry tomato. "Why is everything… like this?"_

 _"Huh. So this is deconstructed food," Billy said, grinning apologetically. They did this thing where they would order for each other every time they were eating a new place. Whoever picked the better dish would be entitled to certain... favors. At least that way, nobody really lost._

 _"What in hipster hell is 'deconstructed'?"_

 _Billy couldn't help the short chuckle that broke through his lips. "I think it's Postmodernism?" he said thoughtfully. "But like… for food?"_

 _Teddy grunted as he twisted a few strands of pasta in his fork. The amatriciana, somehow, had been reconstituted into three silver boats, which he had to pour over the twisted spaghetti in the sequence printed out on the stiff card that came with the dish._

 _"You lose this one, Kaplan," he said, even as his eyes widened with delight when he chewed._

 _Billy smiled as he looked around. It was a fancy place, the kind of fancy that might have taken Avenger strings to get a reservation. The high ceiling was domed and decked with chandeliers that illuminated the space and there were authentic candelabras—yes, honest to god functional candelabras with fire and everything—mounted on the cream-colored walls. The music emanated from an indoor balcony, alternating between a string quartet and what Teddy insisted must be a Venetian castrati choir, and the waiters all spoke English. The very air smelled like perfume or flowers and the crowd, to Billy's untrained eye, seemed fashionable, as one would expect when in Italy. Everything looked expensive—maybe Bishop so-so, but certainly Kaplan expensive—all the way to the tablecloth; in fact, Billy was pretty sure that the napkin cost more than his whole attire._

 _"You're not really here, are you?" he said, still smiling, as he turned back to Teddy._

 _The boy looked ridiculously handsome—more so than usual—though perhaps only in virtue of rarely being seen in a suit, and it seemed that his earrings were especially polished tonight, though that too might simply just be a trick of Billy's remorse. Teddy ate his pasta quietly and thoughtfully and drank the paired wine just as obliviously, the full weight of his attention focused on his meal as if he hadn't heard Billy._

 _"Just like that time in the park," Billy continued. "This is just a memory of you. Of us."_

 _"Come on, Bee. Don't call him that," Teddy said, brandishing his fork between them, which earned him a few disapproving looks from surrounding tables. "I think you should be nicer to him. He's your brother, after all."_

 _Billy watched the memory of the other boy and smiled to himself. He wondered if he could touch this Teddy. If he reached across the table and closed the distance between them, would his hand simply pass through like a hologram? Or would it still land on solid skin, without this Teddy feeling all the weight behind that touch? If he walked over right now and kissed Teddy on the lips, would he..._

 _Billy shook away the thought. "I'm sorry," he said quietly. "I'm so sorry."_

 _The memory began to unravel, starting at the edges. The walls shimmered, frayed, and then disappeared, giving way to an encroaching darkness._

 _"I don't know if you're here somewhere," he continued, looking around hopelessly for the familiar flash of gold and blue. "But I'm hoping you can hear me."_

 _The memory played on. "No, I didn't," the memory of Teddy said, unaware that the world was falling apart. "It's your turn tonight. Did you forget?"_

 _The music had already stopped and there were only four tables around them now. Beyond that, oblivion stretched infinitely to the distance._

 _"Come back to me, please," Billy whispered, as the darkness finally engulfed Teddy, leaving him alone. "I can fix this. Us."_

 _"It's me, Teddy, it's me." He floated in the void, alone, and whispered to himself,_ _"I'm still me. I'm still Billy."_

* * *

It took them two days. And then some more.

They combed through the main office twice, found nothing, and then, just as they were about to give up, they discovered a second archive through a door partially hidden by a cabinet that had fallen to its side.

"Awesome," Iron Lad said happily, as he carelessly blasted the obstructing furniture. The destruction was so loud and excessive, hurling metallic shrapnel, that it forced Hawkeye and Stature to take cover. One particular projectile had nearly hit Adam's arm if not for the quick twist of his cloak that shielded him.

"Hey! Careful!" Hawkeye shouted, peeking out from behind a fallen table when the explosion had cleared.

Nate turned, saw the carnage behind him, and turned beet red. "Oh, shit, sorry."

"S'okay," Adam said, wincing as his head swam with vertigo for a few seconds, the cost of his sudden though inadvertent use of magic. He would take note of that. "But be more careful next time. For now, let's just get through this."

The second room contained higher-class mutants. Telekinesis… Pyrokinesis… All sorts of -kineses… Psychics… Material manipulation… Adam even found a file on Ruixian, which he surreptitiously snuck inside his cloak. By the time they found something, they'd been at it for at least another day and everyone was already exhausted and cranky.

Well, everyone except Iron Lad, who seemed to be so determined and single-minded that he had simply forgotten to feel exhausted and cranky. His laser-focus concentration was tireless and absolute; he could ignore just about all external stimuli, even most of Stature's prodding. They quite literally had to drag him back to the ship to eat and Adam never saw him sleep at all. The boy had a quiet mania about him, Adam observed, which expressed itself in a steady and inexhaustible stamina.

This was understandably important to him. The danger was to the time stream, after all, his fortress, his home. But Adam suspected that the obsession probed at some deeper motive. A softer, more intimate purpose… perhaps the chance to prove to himself that if he could save the world this time, then he could still escape fate… that he could still be a hero—or at the very least, _not_ become a genocidal supervillain. There was something exceedingly maudlin about it: a time traveller who could command fate, except his own.

 _Or maybe_ , _just maybe,_ Adam thought with a sigh, _I'm just projecting_.

It was then that he found the file, when he turned away from the boy's puckered face and glanced through the stack he'd just retrieved. He had almost missed it too, if it hadn't been for the way that the name tingled inside his head. _Dr. Dorothy Talman_ , the folder was labeled. And true enough, there was mention of a speedster.

"Here," he said out loud. "I think I found something." There were towering piles of folders around him, walling him off almost like a fort, and the other three had to squeeze in so they could crowd and crouch alongside him.

"What've you got?" Hawkeye asked, leaning over to look at the opened folder in his hands.

"Subject 407," Adam read aloud. "Accelerated homeostasis. Speed-adapted physiology. Hyper-accelerated neurocognition. Something about an electron transport chain? Fully realized alpha-class speedster—there we go—and... chronopathic awareness and entropic manipulation? Some measurements here… and he was nineteen years old at the date of the last—" he paused as he stared at the next word and for a moment, he froze, his vision swimming and turning red.

"Hey…" Cassie said, her voice breaking through the haze in his head and her gentle hand on his arm bringing him back. "Would you like me to?"

Adam cleared his throat and shook his head. "Nineteen years old on the date of the last experiment," he continued. "Attending physician was one Anupama Raut."

Then the words ran out and he stopped. No further information.

"Anything else?" Hawkeye asked softly just as Iron Lad insisted, "There must be more."

"There's a CD but it's all scratched up."

Nate pressed a few buttons on his wrist and, with an impatient clicking of his fingers, said, "Give it here. I think I can squeeze something out."

Adam passed him the disc and watched a thin beam of light slowly sweep across the diffractive underside. "It's pretty bad," Iron Lad said as the laser returned for a second scan. "But it should work. Maybe if I just—aha!" There was a soft beep on the sixth scan and Iron Lad, triumphantly punching the air, quickly stood up and started pacing the room.

Stature and Adam exchanged an amused look and even Hawkeye couldn't help but smile a little. It was a sudden and jarring reminder: unlike them, Nate was still just a kid.

"Blood work… biopsies... genome sequencing… ECG… It's all here, and all very boring…" Iron Lad muttered excitedly as he hovered a few inches off the ground and circuited around the room. "Oh, there's a video dated seven years ago."

He paused in mid-air and quickly turned to Adam with a quizzical look.

"You don't have to be here," Hawkeye whispered to him as she placed a hand on his shoulder.

"She's right," Stature added from his other side. "We can do this part without you."

"No, I have to—I uh…" Adam took a deep breath and drew himself up. "He's my brother; I need to know what happened to him. Play the video," he said with a curt nod to Iron Lad.

The boy smiled and returned the nod, as if in acknowledgement or respect. Then, he lifted an arm to his side. "Opening video file." A beam of light projected from his palm to the wall. There was some wavering in the image as the camera focused in and out of a boy strapped to the wall. Iron Lad scaled the projection up and manipulated the image quality, so that it looked as if the slightly pixelated boy was in the room with them.

His arms, legs, and neck were held back by metal bands, fixing him to the wall in a grotesque crucifixion. His white hair, filthy and unevenly cut, hid his face from view but otherwise all parts of him were exposed.

The boy looked well-fed and healthy, if not for the bruises and scars all over his body. There was one particularly prominent and vile scar—a long vertical line of raised flesh running from the hollow of his throat all the way down to his navel, crossed with shorter horizontal lines at intervals to indicate where the stitches had been sown. Adam had only ever seen such a thing once: back in the Cube, during the War, and only on non-human subjects; it was the mark of autopsy or, in this case, vivisection. There was a profusion of lesser scars, contusions, and scabs on his torso, where most parts of interest were safeguarded, and every limb bore the marks of experimentation, especially his legs, where chunks of muscle seemed to be missing. Even the boy's penis looked a little raw and his left testicle had a silvery scar, where an incision had been made.

"Subject Four-Oh-Seven," a female voice said off-screen with a slight Indian accent. "This is Dr. Anupama working on project IDC3572, subsection 2c: Study on Optical Perception of Speed-Enhanced Individuals. Today, we are performing protocol 34F: corneal endothelial scraping, followed by 34G: retinal extraction. This would be subject's eleventh surgery in the left eye, after a healing time of four days."

And then, muttering to someone off screen, Dr. Anupama added, "Make sure to get good clean samples. Results from previous experiments suggest adaptations for light capture in the rods but Dr. Talman hypothesizes the brain does most of the cognitive compensation for perception-adjustment at high speed. Oh and that reminds me, Dolly, schedule a spinal fluid extraction for next week and book the theater for a brain biopsy the day after."

There was a click followed by a loud buzz as two metallic arms entered the scene from the sides. The boy didn't so much as flinch as the machine shaved off what was left of his hair, gliding smoothly over his head with mechanical precision.

"Subject Four-Oh-Seven, hold the head up," Dr. Anupama said.

The boy obeyed. And when he lifted his head, his lifeless green eyes stared directly at Adam.

"Oh, Adam," Stature whispered from somewhere to his side.

But her voice sounded far away. Right now there was only him and the boy who was his brother staring at him across the ocean of time.

It was Adam's face. Even without hair, it was his, just a little more angular, sallow-skinned, and thoroughly devoid of life.

There was another click and a panel slid from the wall, just above the boy's head. A metallic syringe came out attached to a metal lever, which bent at two joints to position the needle right over his eye.

"Hold very still." A woman entered the screen, short, Chinese, and held up the boy's chin. She kept her face away from the camera, only flashing it very briefly when she turned to check the alignment of the boy's head. "We don't want to damage anything like last time, do we?"

Another click and there was a whirring sound. The syringe slowly moved forward into the boy's eye.

"Nate, stop," Hawkeye said suddenly and Subject Four-Oh-Seven and the machines vanished into thin air.

Her hands were immediately on Adam's shoulders, pulling him abruptly in a tight hug."We'll find him. I promise," she whispered.

"And then what?" Adam asked in a dead voice, dazed, his own eyes now staring blankly at the spot on the wall where his brother had been.

"Then Ruixian will fix him and we'll rehabilitate him. It has been done before. With the Winter Soldier."

He let her hold him, though he received no comfort from the gesture. And soon enough, Cassie's arms were around him too, enclosing him from the other side so that he was trapped between the two girls. Even Nate deigned to join the tableau, hovering closer and placing a gloved hand on Adam's head in his own way of expressing sympathy. Adam almost expected him to say "There, there."

A few seconds passed before anyone thought to break the silence.

"Where are you now?" Hawkeye asked. She disentangled herself from Adam and turned back to read the Dorothy Talman file. "What happened to you? And why are you picking out the First Seven?"

"Do you think he escaped, when the Red Skull attacked?" Stature asked, leaning over to read the file alongside Hawkeye.

"Well, the last operation was performed six years ago… he probably escaped way back then."

"I'm sorry," Iron Lad said suddenly. "This is a dead-end. Three days here and we still don't know where he is. And I'm very sorry I put you through that, Adam."

He had a look of pain on his face, regret and genuine remorse carved in the deep trenches of his forehead. Though whether that was because he had hurt Adam or because he thought they had wasted three days on a lead that had turned up nothing, Adam couldn't tell.

But it wasn't all for nothing. Adam knew where to go now, what to do next. He should have noticed it a long time ago, but he had been so distracted. By his exile, his plans to run away, plunging back into the Avengers' world… But the shock of seeing his brother chained up like an animal, bound and mutilated and broken… it triggered something in his mind. He remembered something Hawkeye had said before, an afterthought back in the Roost. It had been lost on him then, when his mind was all fogged up with drugs and injury and no cogent thought could penetrate it clearly.

"I wouldn't say that," he said. "I know her. I know where to find her."

"Who? Talman or Raut?"

"And I know what my brother's doing and how to find the First Seven. Hell, I even know who spelled my box." He was on feet now, walking quickly out of the room.

"Wait, slow down, Asgardian!" Hawkeye called out from behind him. He was already rushing through the corridor and, without apparent surprise or effort, she was already trailing his heels. "Who do you know? Talman? Raut?"

"Neither. I know the nurse."

"Wait. What do you mean you _know_ her?" Stature asked, shocked. She was beside him now too, having caught up together with Iron Lad.

"You know the woman who tortured your brother?" Iron Lad asked indifferently.

"Of course," Adam replied, turning to the boy with a wry smile. "Her husband makes the best waffles."

* * *

Le Jardin in the early morning was almost a pretty sight.

It was an old building built on brick and forgotten memory, a leftover from the Japanese Occupation of the 1940s. It started off as a hospital, Raffles Infirmary, which also doubled as the secret stronghold of a unified British and Singaporean resistance group. Then, after the war was won and Madripoor was liberated from the Japanese, it was refurbished and repurposed into the Madripoor Museum of Modern History, which was intended to be something of a minor historical site near the bustling market of Vineyard Road. It made some money, at first, while the wounds of war were still fresh, but two decades later—once the massacre and the rapine had faded from public consciousness—it was redesigned into a public art house for local works, the Galleria Madripoor, which promptly became a national Embarrassment for the next twenty-eight years.

It was only during the Asian Financial Crisis of the late 90s that the old building found new purpose and began to turn a profit, when it was acquired by one Sim Guan Yuan of the Sim family of Malaysia—a family that had made its fortune in real estate and property development. Guan Yuan kept the paintings and the statues (some of the rooms today still had these works of art) and the original flooring and fittings. But he scrubbed the exterior until it was the acceptable shade of gentrified brown, erected tastefully matching brick walls to section the galleries into rooms, and even installed an elevator. When the bandages finally fell away after a year-long restoration, Galleria Madripoor had transformed into the swanky-looking Sim Hotel, which played host to small-time celebrities and minor dignitaries. Business was good for a while and the young realtor was satisfied with the small fortune that his investment raked in.

And then, in the wake of Madripoor's construction boom at the turn of the millenium, property value and room reservations plummeted when, to Sim Guan Yuan's horror, brown-skinned immigrants began flooding into surrounding Melaka. Sometime in 2007, he sold the rapidly devaluing building to the unwitting Lee Fan Mi, a wealthy and ambitious heir determined to prove his chops to his stoic and stubbornly unimpressed father. It was he who remodeled Sim Hotel into an apartment building and pompously re-re-re-rechristened it _Le Jardin_ , much to the alienated consternation of blue-collared Melaka and the haughty amusement of wealthy Vineyard. And to the present day, it had endured in this current incarnation. It was still somewhat expensive though not so much for its increasingly out-of-date amenities but for its proximity to the city center. Fortunately, with Jacob's financial support and his own fair-skinned looks (exoticism, after all, was a matter of local consensus), Adam was still able to afford the place.

Now, under the gray drizzle of an early Sunday morning, Le Jardin projected an air of its old dignified charm though its snobbish look had been cowed somewhat by the makeshift market stalls that crowded around its perimeter like an aging dowager's warts. It was home—for the past three years, at least. And in all the seven years he had spent in exile, it was those three years in Madripoor that he felt most at ease, most safe, certainly, and at times, even almost happy.

And to think, all this time, he had been living in a nest of mages. Now the sight of it twisted his stomach and made him want to retch; his skin crackled with electricity and pent-up fury and his blood boiled with the outrage of betrayal.

The vine-veined façade cut an imposing figure in the gray overcast morning and the very air around the building felt weird with magic, hidden so very adeptly and visible to him only because he now knew to look for it—and even then only very slightly. Adam's hands clenched and unclenched beside him as he stared at the half-crumbled walls protecting the residents of Le Jardin from the relative poverty of Melaka (for true Madripoor poverty, after all, was assiduously confined to Lowtown).

"Just me," he said, as he looked through a small circle he'd made with his thumb and forefinger.

There was a small white boy whom Adam didn't recognize, playing with an old Gameboy on the foyer steps. A few times his attention drifted over to them, quick furtive glances with eyes too sharp and too knowing to belong to a common boy. He flashed a shy smile when he saw Adam watching.

"Tough. I'm going with you," Hawkeye said. "Ruixian too, I bet."

"And me and Cassie," Iron Lad insisted, already hovering forward.

Adam sighed and held the boy back by the shoulder. "Wait," he said impatiently, turning him around. "The whole place is warded. It will only accept mystics."

"What are you talking about?" Ruixian scoffed. "I've been here like a million times."

"Yeah, well, something's changed. Besides," Adam flicked his eyes and gave her a sidelong look. "We'll need Eli soon."

"I'm working on it," she said coolly, though her upper lip curled a little. "The damage is profound and extensive. And even when I'm done with him, I can only give you Eli. Not Patriot."

Adam turned his head and fixed her the full weight of his gaze. "Figure it out," he said. "You want to be a superhero? Do your part. We all have to do things we don't want to do so suck it up. I know that you can do this because you are brilliant and powerful and I have faith in you. All right? So stop making excuses, stop whining, and just do your fucking part, _Synapse_."

"Fine." Her eyes grew wide at the viciousness of his rebuke. "Good pep talk," she muttered. "Kate's right; it's a lousy code name."

"We clear? Good. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a nice elderly couple to kill."

He took a step forward and a hand touched his arm. "Avengers don't kill, Adam," Stature said.

"Good thing I'm not an Avenger then."

* * *

The boy insisted on holding his hand all the way up to the apartment. At the foyer he had greeted Adam as Heir Supreme but after that, he made no further attempt at conversation; instead, he spent the time with his face turned up at Adam, mouth agape, and staring rather rudely with wide unblinking eyes that were either impressed or mortified. His features were eclectically Eurasian: slanted eyes, high cheekbones, small but plump limps, and the intimation of what would be a strong jaw later in life. The combination resulted in a rather odd face at this age but somehow, through no stunt of magic or special intuition, Adam knew that the boy would grow into his looks and might even be handsome.

Adam might have missed the sense of what the boy was, if not for the wild crop of scruffy blond hair, the color of rippling barley, which seemed to have been cut in haste by an unpracticed hand. "Has anyone told you it's rude to stare?" he asked, turning away from the penetrating stare of icy blue eyes. "What's your name, kid?"

"Popo says I'm not supposed to tell strangers my name," the boy said as they stepped out of the elevator.

"Timeless advice. But as mages, we usually mean demons when we give that talk to kids. Do I look like a demon to you?" Perhaps a bit of Mephisto still lingered in his soul.

"Does it hurt?" The boy asked. He had a strange way of pronouncing his syllables, something halfway between Singaporean and Filipino, though he seemed to be attempting to reflect Adam's accent.

Adam arched an eyebrow. He lifted his arms to his sides to give himself a quick scan and saw no wounds. "No?" he said, doubtfully.

"It looks really painful."

Adam sighed and forced a smile. "I'm fine, kid." Today of all days, he had no patience for creepy comments from creepy children.

The boy tugged him along an elaborately decorated hallway, all the way to the end where a white intricately carved door was waiting. As they stepped closer, the boy tightened his grip on Adam's hand as his free one flourished in a series of Forms (none of which Adam recognized) as he muttered a series of harsh clipped syllables. ' _Alohomora!_ ' he whispered finally to the glowing doorknob, glancing back at Adam and flashing a coy smile.

Adam frowned but he couldn't help but return the smile. Truth be told, he wasn't sure the last part was necessary. Perhaps, the boy was just being cheeky. He didn't respond, when Adam asked, but instead fell back to silence as he opened the door and diligently dragged his guest to the kitchen, where Dolly was already waiting.

She was in one of her better dresses—the white lacy one that Adam had once said was 'nice'—and her hair was pulled back in a tight bun by a string of pearls. She seemed to have been lost in thought when Adam came in, chewing on her lower lip as her hands worried at the pearl necklace hanging loosely about her thin neck. But as soon as she saw him, her thin lips curled to a smile, as if this visit had been planned and they were just having another Sunday brunch. There were even waffles on the table.

"Come sit, Mr. Thorne. You must have so many questions," she said as her hands froze in a tangle of pearls. She saw him looking and quickly withdrew her hands under the table. "Teddy, sweetling, why don't you go find Gong Gong and tell him our guest's here? Then, you can go watch some tv, hmm?"

 _Another one,_ Adam thought as he let go of the boy's hand and took the seat opposite the old woman. _Is the universe mocking me?_

"Yes, Popo!" Teddy said as he took out the Gameboy he'd stuffed in his pocket.

Adam turned away and heard the scuffle of small feet running off.

"Kids these days," Dolly said ruefully, watching the boy with an expression of fondness. She still had a smile on her face, though it trembled a little on her glossy lips. "Dragging their gadgets everywhere. You weren't like that at that age, were you, Mr. Thorne?"

Adam didn't respond but he placed his hands on the table, a courtesy between mystics, which the old mage readily mirrored. Behind him, his red cloak billowed out once, in warning, and then fell back heavily.

"I apologize for the small talk, Mr. Thorne," Dolly said, struggling to keep the smile on her face. "I'm afraid, you see, and that's how I cope."

"What are you afraid of?" Adam asked in a slow dispassionate tone, keeping his voice steady. The hair on his arms was bristling with rage at the sweetness of her voice.

"What—why you, of course!" she said, her dark eyes growing wide as if this were obvious. "Oh, dear, the things you must think of me!"

Adam let out a slow exhale, focusing on keeping his breathing even and his temper in check. "You tortured my brother."

"Torture?" She made a squeaking sound and a wrinkled hand flew to cover her thin lips. "Oh, dear... Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear! I did no such thing."

"I saw you, Dolly. There was a video."

"My dear Adam, no," she murmured in a pained voice. Her hands reached across the table to grasp Adam's but he quickly pulled them back, just out of her range. "I protected him. Best as I could. They were going to do terrible things to him. Those horrible people in that horrible place. And to be perfectly honest with you, I wouldn't have cared one bit for a mutant. I am a mage, after all, and I have no love for these impurities.

"But he is your brother, Heir Supreme, and we love _you_. So I protected him, on your behalf. I spared him from the worst of it, whenever I could. Made it as painless as possible, when I couldn't. I protected him, consoled him, took care of him. Loved him, even! Oh, that you would think I'd harm poor Thomas!"

 _Thomas_. That was his brother's name. _Thomas._ Already the sound of it made him feel whole, as if it had started to fill in the cracks that he didn't know were there in the first place.

Dolly was on her feet now, shaking and in tears, visibly upset. She brought a fist to her mouth and bit. "Oh, my poor Thomas." Just as abruptly, she collapsed back into her seat and sobbed into her hands. "My poor, poor Thomas."

Adam stared at her with wide-eyed shock, taken aback by the unexpected display of emotion. It almost moved him to sympathy. Almost.

"You must forgive my wife, Heir Supreme," Sutan said from the doorway, frowning with concern for his wife. He was wearing his formal _batik_ shirt and a pair of black pants. His mustache was was even trimmed —something Adam had never seen before—and his black hair was combed back neatly. "The past few years have been hard on our whole Family." He took the seat beside Dolly and kissed her white hair. "Now, please, let us talk. There is so much we need to tell you."

"This, first," Adam said. He reached inside his cloak and retrieved Jacob's box. "I should have realized it was you. You were the only other person to touch it."

Sutan smiled weakly as he took the box between his hands. "I expected you sooner, Heir Supreme. I left you this clue on purpose." There was no sound or burst of light; he simply touched the lock and the box clicked open. One of the most complex and sophisticated spellwork that Adam had ever seen and it fell away without so much as a single invoked Form. "But now it has been months. And I'm afraid we are too late."

"You are of the Seven," Adam declared, as if in accusation.

"We are. How did you know?"

"I've never seen enchantment that complex. I was right there in front of you yet somehow you managed to cast it without me noticing." Adam paused. "How did you do it? That box was in your hands for only a few seconds."

Sutan smiled again as he nodded. "Our line is very old, Heir Supreme. Old as magic itself; we remember the purest ways of casting and many of the forgotten spells." He reached across the table slowly, respectfully tilting his head, and touched Adam's wrist. He ran a thumb over one of the bracelets. "But you, Heir Supreme... even without a formal education, you're quite the formidable mage. You are resourceful and clever. This is spirit magic, yes? I doubt they'd condescend to teach their ways to a human, so I'm thinking you figured this out yourself?"

Adam responded with a brusque nod, letting his eyes fall to where Sutan was playing with one of his string bracelets. "A spirit gave me a spell. It wasn't too hard to break it down and work out a system inductively. It's very rudimentary of course; there is only so much that I could parse from _one_ spell."

"Of course, of course. Still. To work out the fundamentals on your own... Fascinating," Sutan said. He turned Adam's hand around and studied the line of knots with the focused eye of erudition. "But this is not protection. This is… meta-magic." His eyes flicked up to meet Adam's. "So it has finally reached you too, Heir Supreme. You know that magic is fading."

Adam nodded again, holding back the sudden pang of guilt that might show on his face. "When did you figure out that I'm a mage?"

"The first time we laid eyes on you."

"How? I was very careful."

Sutan smiled warily. "Our Family specializes in time magic, Heir Supreme. And you are covered in scars."

"Time magic?" Adam echoed, frowning. "I've never dealt with time magic."

"You have, when you created Adam Thorne."

Adam paused for a while and his frown deepened. He had not expected that response. "That was a memory spell."

"A shadow, Heir Supreme, a shadow." The old man chuckled, withdrawing his hand as he leaned back and sat up straight. "Memory is but the shadow of time," he said. His voice had taken on a patient lecturing tone. "Even now, I look at your soul all wrapped up and bandaged, barely held together with staple and duct tape. You've done a commendable job, considering, but there's no way of hiding the wounds of amputation."

Amputation? Is that what he had done?

"And this construct that you've made, this _Adam Thorne_ ," Sutan went on. "It is highly unstable. It is made of ill-fitting fragments that you've cobbled together with brute force of magic. The spellwork is formidable, I'll admit, and it might have lasted you a while—a few decades, maybe—but now it seems that something has changed... Something is pulling at the seams to disentangle you from Adam Thorne. Consequently, the disturbance has accelerated the construct's attrition and so it has begun falling apart, your true self alongside it. And now that magic is failing, well… You must make Adam Thorne whole and true soon, Heir Supreme, or it would fracture what is left of you too. It will feed on you until there is nothing left."

He had always had some awareness of that fact. The moment memories of his old life began slipping away, he knew that the weight of the spell would one day overwhelm him. He remembered nothing now... Who had he been before he became Adam Thorne? He must have had a family... friends... people whom he loved and who loved him. And he had a name, another name that was not Adam, but he forgot it now.

Whoever he had been was now the dream, already forgotten at the moment of waking, and Adam Thorne, the lie, had usurped its place to become the waking truth.

He was changing, he could feel it; the Rubicon was turning and rushing around him. One day he would lose all semblance of self and find himself so inseparable from the mask that he now wore. In all but physical sense, it would be his death.

"Magic is failing," Adam said quietly, pulling himself out from the mire of his thoughts. It was time to change the subject. "You must hate me. This is all my fault."

"It is," Sutan said.

"But we don't hate you," Dolly added. She removed her hands from her face and blinked back a few times to banish the remaining tears. "You are Heir Supreme and our fate is with you. So, no, we cannot bring ourselves to hate you, no matter how deserved it is. And—and, this whole thing it is our fault too. The Seven has failed in its purpose."

Adam frowned again. "What do you mean? What purpose?"

Dolly and Sutan exchanged a look and, as if coming to an unspoken agreement, nodded. They held hands on the table and turned back to Adam.

It was Sutan who spoke first. "The reason the Seven exists. It extends all the way back to the purpose of magic itself. Simply put, we exist to serve the Heir Supreme... to shield him and nurture him until he is ready to ascend to Sorcerer Supreme. And then after, to find new candidates and identify the next Heir," he explained. "As you well know, it is the Sorcerer Supreme's job to protect the universe— _this_ universe—from outside threats. You see, this is why He is given so much power, for this is the true nature of magic: it is the universe protecting itself. With the Heir as its focal point during the Ascension, magic incarnates itself in the form of the Sorcerer Supreme."

"I protect the universe and you protect me, is that it?"

Sutan nodded. "And because you are magic-become-form, it could be said by the logic of transitivity that our purpose in protecting the Heir Supreme is to protect magic itself."

"So it is clear that the fault is ours," Dolly continued. She stared at Adam for a while and then shook her head. "It has been so long since we've been needed. Heirs have been Ascending for thousands of years without the Seven and Sorcerers Supreme have been taking charge of their Heirs, as Strange had done with you even though he was not aware of the line of Succession then. Without the Ascension to give us purpose, we became obsolete."

"So you decided to use your magic for personal gain. From servants to aristocrats," Adam said bluntly. He hadn't meant it to injure, only to state a fact, but all the same, the old couple seemed as if he'd slapped them in the face.

Dolly nodded, closing her eyes in shame. "Mages or not, we are human too. The Seven forgot its purpose and we used our gift to build our wealth. We abandoned our purpose to serve and instead began to take. The old stories were passed on, our true purpose, from generation to generation, but only in the way of myths. Like a legend or a folktale. Some of the ceremonies of Ascension even survive. But nobody takes it seriously now." She paused for a while and stared at her hands. "And now… look at what it has all come to. Humanity under siege and we've no proper magic to protect us."

"So you know about that too?"

"The spirits have warned us, though we fear that it is too late. All of humanity is under attack. First the Inhumans, then the mutants, and now, even the larger common population. Everyone except those bearing the touch of magic. For some reason, we have been left unmolested; even as our powers atrophy and we fade, no move has been taken against us."

"Perhaps, it is coming from the magical community," Adam offered.

Dolly shook her head. "This is no magic. It's hard to explain but if anything, it is the _opposite_ of magic. We have tried, of course, to divine who our enemy is but the only thing we could glean of its nature is the overwhelming sense of _corruption_. No mystic has seen anything like this. No spirit of Earth has seen anything like this. And this is all our fault!" She seemed as if she was about to cry again but she sniffed a few times and the tears were gone.

"Is this why my brother is casting a ritual spell?"

That caught them off guard. They certainly did not expect him to know _that._

"To what? To punish you for your mistakes?" he pressed on.

"How do you know about the spell?" Sutan asked, glancing at the doorway leading to the living room. He flicked a hand and gestured. The door closed shut and locked itself.

"Did you really think that multiple assassinations among the Seven would escape the Avengers' attention?"

"The _Avengers_?" Dolly sniffed and sneered. "What do those costumed charlatans know of magic?"

"Nothing. But you forget that I was once an Avenger too. And _I_ know a ritual spell when I see one. "

"How? This is a spell that has never been cast before."

"A friend of mine—a _common_ human, you would call her—was the one to point it out, actually," Adam said. "She said something, what was it… oh, yes, she said that it was 'circular'. I had weakened the Seven's powers and now my brother is hunting your Families down. It didn't register at the time because I had brain injury and was really high on meds. But when I saw my brother chained up to a wall, naked and disfigured by Dolly here, I saw it at once. The structure. _Circular_ , she had said. It wasn't too difficult to see after that. He's my brother, after all, my _twin_ brother—practically me, where genetics is concerned, and you could even place him as my reflection, my inversion, if you weave your Forms right. A cognate genetic proxy? Come on, it's too obvious. The whole thing smells like ritual magic to me, I just don't know what it's for."

Adam had struck home. He could see it in Dolly's and Sutan's eyes and the tight-lipped silence that they now shared. He smiled at them, quietly watched them for a while, and then stabbed a waffle with his fork.

"I have a feeling..." he began, closing his eyes and taking a deep breath. His blood turned cold and his fingers stiffened with the urge to punch something. "By the nervous, guilty look on your faces, it seems that you already know that my brother's after you, that you're the ones who took him from Singapore, that you hid him, and that you're the ones using him for this spell." He opened his eyes and watched them. "Tell me I'm wrong," he said, still smiling, as he brought a small piece of pastry to his mouth. It was crisp and moist, perfect just like how Sutan always made it. "Come on, try."

Dolly cleared her throat before answering. "We cannot tell you what it's for. We want to but we can't. In this, we are sworn to inviolable secrecy, by oath, blood and magic." She pressed her hands together and lifted the fingers to her lips, as if in prayer.

Adam dropped his smile. In their world, there was no vow more solemn. "Tell me where my brother is."

"On his way to a gathering of the heads of the First Seven."

"Where?"

"Cape of Good Hope."

"Call him back. Now."

"We cannot."

Adam leaned back on his chair and chewed thoughtfully. "Anything else you wanna tell me about him?"

"Nothing more," Sutan said resolutely.

"Then I'll kill you now."

"Heir Supreme, no!" Dolly shrieked suddenly, rising swiftly to her feet and stepping backwards until her back hit a counter.

"The Others do not know you're here," Sutan said quickly. "Only my Family does. You are safe here, while we live."

"I can protect myself."

"Then do it for gratitude. You have been under my protection all these years. Le Jardin… all of Melaka. All this time, my Family has been looking out for you, shielding you from harm. We have been your friends, Heir Supreme, all this time, even when you did not know it."

"Protection?" Adam raised an eyebrow. "I was attacked in this very building. You allowed my friend to be _kidnapped_ and tortured for a month! Shall I inflict the same suffering on you and call it even?"

"We took your brother in!" Dolly cried hysterically. "We clothed him, fed him, and loved him as our own son! Years before you even stepped foot on Madripoor!"

Adam felt electricity ripple over his skin and he rose slowly to his feet. "Are you telling me—" he was trying very hard not to lose control "—that all this time, my twin brother was living in the same building as me? Just two floors down? All these years?"

"Yes, Heir Supreme!" Sutan said, pushing back against the table and stepping away. He moved closer to his wife and placed an arm in front of her, as if to shield her from Adam.

"You lied to me! You kept him from me!"

The house was shaking now, trembling at Adam's wrath. Sutan and Dolly huddled and cowered together and stared at the dust falling from the ceiling. Outside, there was an insistent knocking and the terrified voice of a small boy calling for his grandparents. It nagged at Adam and gave him pause, but his rage was so great that he could see nothing else but red.

 _This isn't you,_ a voice inside him whispered. _Come back. This isn't you._

"He didn't want to see you!" Dolly said desperately, almost muffled as she pressed her face into her husband's chest. "We wanted to take him to you but he didn't want you to see him. Not yet, he said. Not like that! Oh, Heir Supreme, forgive us! But we loved him." She turned to him and lifted her hands again in the gesture of the Mystic's Vow. "We loved and protected him and healed him!"

"Healed him?!" Adam roared. There was a loud ripping sound and a huge crack appeared on the wall to his right side. "You mutilated him! And now you have turned him into a weapon!"

Adam raised a hand and the wall exploded outwards, exposing the kitchen to the open sky. "Come! Let me split your decrepit chests open with my bare hands. I promise I shall stitch you back together good as new and we'll call it even!"

"Heir Supreme, no! Please, we beg your mercy!" Sutan shouted, as his wife howled in fear. "Please! We have not done enough, we confess, and we could have done more! We confess! Mercy, please!"

Mercy, he had the gall to ask, mercy! Did Adam's brother receive mercy? Did _Adam_?

"We are mages, Sutan," Adam said slowly in a low voice. "Mercy is not our way."

"Then a deal!" the old man said, lifting both his hands before him in a placating gesture. There were tears gathering in his eyes and he kept glancing at the closed door, where the boy's desperate knocking was now accompanied by a relentless crying.

"You have nothing to offer me." Adam took a step forward and lifted a gnarled hand. Magic swirled excitedly in his belly, blunted and broken and corrupt. It was all wrong but he would force it to its knees. He would take it, bend it, mangle it, batter it to the shape he needed, until it obeyed his will.

"I can help you find that which is lost."

"I've lost many things, mage."

"All of which you can regain with the Ars Notoria!"

Adam halted his advance.

"I know you've been looking for it, Heir Supreme," Sutan pressed on. "And so I have been looking for it too. In your service."

Wielders of memory magic. Of course. If anyone knew about the damned Book, it would be them.

"What do you know?" Adam raised a hand and prepared to strike.

"No, please…" Sutan opened his mouth to say something further but it caught in his throat and his face soured in a grimace. When he finally gained the composure to speak again, his voice came quiet and small. "Heir Supreme, please… The child..."

Adam glanced at the door and saw that it was rattling violently. Through the crack at the base, he saw pulses of green light as the boy tried to use broken magic to pry open a path. There was muttering on the other side, in an oriental-sounding dialect that Adam didn't recognize. And then, when the spell failed, there was a sharp cry, followed by a renewed pounding on the door and an uncontrollable wailing.

"Fine," Adam spat. "You! Torturess! Get out of my sight. Take the boy and your whole damn Family with you. Run far away and take care that you never cross my path again."

Dolly turned her tear-streaked face to her husband and stared. There was a moment of shared understanding between them before their eyes closed and their foreheads pressed against each other. Sutan muttered something to Dolly—his last instructions, no doubt—and then, in one fluid motion, the old woman climbed to her feet, eyes downcast as she glided away to her grandson.

"Popo!" the boy cried out when the door flung open.

Adam forced himself to look and saw that the boy was in tears—tiny hands frozen before him mid-Form and shaking in an uncontrollable and exaggerated manner. His whole body was trembling too and his t-shirt was soaked with tears, snot, and what might be the blood that was running down from his ears. Beside him, on the floor, was his Gameboy in pieces.

Dolly quickly swept him in her bony arms and fled the apartment without a word. There was a short moment of peace, during which Adam calmed himself and collected his thoughts, before the boy resumed his hysterical shrieking again.

"What about Gong Gong?" He went at it in a loop, his hysterical piercing voice drifting all the way form the corridor. "What about Gong Gong?"

Adam waited for a few minutes, closing his eyes and focusing on his breath; he could not bear to listen to the boy's misery. Once everything had finally turned quiet and he was sure that the building had been vacated, he turned back to Sutan.

"Now, let's talk."

* * *

Sutan shuffled towards the table and sank back in his chair. "Will you spare me?"

Adam watched the old man with cold indifferent eyes. The sight of the boy was still fresh in his mind and for some reason—a reason, which, in fact, he understood very well—he was certain that he would do no harm to the child. And that meant sparing the grandfather too.

"It depends on what you have to say. The Ars Notoria. Now."

"It is a sacred book, Heir Supreme," Sutan said cautiously. "Especially to my Family."

"Then you're familiar with it," Adam said, returning to his seat.

"I know most than anyone yet still too little."

Adam slammed his fist on the table. "Out with it, old man, I've wasted enough time."

Sutan bowed. "We have scoured the Earth, as you have Heir Supreme, and found no trace of the Book of Memories. Your mistake had been to assume that it was a book in the conventional sense."

Adam glared at the old mage. "Fuck," he muttered as the implications dawned on him. "Goddamn mystical bullshit... It's a person, isn't it? The Ars Notoria is a person? That's always the plot twist. It's always a fucking person with these things." He rolled his eyes and scowled.

Sutan's lips lifted in a small smile. "Maybe," he shrugged. "Though probably not. It could be a place, a spell, the arrangement of stars on a certain month, a certain place seen from a certain vantage point at a certain time of day, maybe even the arrangement of leaves on a tree… or you're right, it could be a person. He'd have to be very old though—or maybe a family line. My wife tells me that the human mitochondrion bequeathes genetic information matrilineally without the corrupting threat of mutation; the Ars Notoria could be found in that genome. It could be anything, really, anything that could store information."

"And I take it you've already looked."

"We've considered everything, Heir Supreme. Everything that might hold a mystical significance to the idea of Memory. Either the book has been destroyed or it is not on Earth."

Even Jacob couldn't find it. Adam ran his hand through his hair and sighed. "Or it could just be a myth."

"The Ars Notoria is real, Heir Supreme," Sutan said with grim conviction. "My father used to tell me that the Book is all around us."

"More mystical bullshit. That's helpful," Adam mumbled under his breath.

"It exists, Heir Supreme. I scried for the book and I can assure you that it is no myth. I've employed spirits and seers to hazard a glimpse but that didn't turn out so well for most of us." He released the top button of his _batik_ and pulled the collar to one side to reveal a long angry-looking scar just beneath his clavicle. "We all came back with this mark. Everyone except my grandson."

"Teddy?" The name came to his lips faster than he could restrain himself. "You risked your own grandson?"

"I've always known he was special. The day he was born, he looked at me with those blue eyes— _impossible_ blue eyes, mind you, considering his genealogy—and I knew that he was special, even for a mage. First time he did magic, he wasn't even a year old. Scared the hell out of us." The old man smiled and a tear fell from his eye. "He wasn't always named Teddy, you know? He used to be our little Kris. But after glimpsing the Book, he insisted we call him Teddy from that point on."

Adam felt the hair on his arms standing on end. There was something there. Was Teddy— _his_ Teddy—connected to the Ars Notoria? Did the Book of Memories hold the answer to the riddle of Teddy Altman? It was too much of a coincidence but Adam couldn't see the significance just yet.

"What did Te—your grandson see?" he asked.

Sutan swallowed before he spoke. "He said that the book was vast and infinite, that when it was opened it spread out from ground to sky. And he said that there was a man studying it."

"Did he see the man's face?"

"No, his back was turned to him the whole time. The only thing he saw was that the man had dark hair."

A possibility quickly presented itself to Adam. "Is the child a prophet?"

"He bears the signs, yes. You think the man he saw is you? In the future?"

"Maybe," Adam said with a shrug. "That would mean that I find the Ars Notoria. So yeah, I'm hoping."

"I wouldn't hope, if I were you, Heir Supreme," Sutan said softly, respectfully averting his eyes to the table. "Teddy gave me the impression that the man was trying to do something with the Book. And whatever it was, it wasn't working."

The yellow lights flickered above them as Adam waited for the old man to say more. "Is there anything else, Sutan?" he asked, urging him on.

"Well, there is one other thing that Teddy told me."

"Out with it, then."

"I'm afraid it would just annoy you, Heir Supreme."

"I'm already more than annoyed with you."

Sutan looked up and gave Adam a small smile. "Very well," he said and cleared his throat. "The boy said that the Ars Notoria can be found nowhere, in the place between places, where people always look."

"You're right." Adam groaned; he hated it when mystics did that. "That _is_ annoying." He stood up and turned to leave. "Thank you, Sutan. For your protection, for rescuing and taking care of my brother, and for helping me with the Ars Notoria. You have been a true friend."

He stepped out into the living room and quickly made his way out the front door. He had already spent too much time here and every second counted against a speedster; for all he knew, the heads of the First Seven might all be dead by now.

"Heir Supreme," Sutan called out from behind him. "Thank you. I—"

Adam raised a hand over his shoulder and without breaking his stride or looking back said, "Leave this place and never show your face to me again."

Adam left the building quietly and walked back to the gates, where Kate, Nate, and Cassie where waiting for him. Then, once he felt Sutan's presence flash and disappear, he lifted his arms over his head and sketched his Forms. The strings spun around his arms and legs, modifying his broken magic, contorting it to the correct shape, and filling in the cracks. He uttered a single word in corrupt Acadian—harsh, monosyllabic—and his eyes flashed blue.

And then, he fell. First to his knees and finally to his face. The ground was hard and scraped his skin and the air was so cold he was shivering. But all that was a distant thought. He laid there for a moment, motionless as the rain soaked through his clothes. He imagined that it would soak into his bones too and dissolve him in a puddle. At some point, a pair of hands grabbed him by the arms and lifted him up.

"Cape of Good Hope," he muttered to Nate as darkness fell around him like a curtain.

Behind him, there was an explosion of heat and light and Le Jardin, his sanctuary, his home, with all its memories and its many names, went up in flames.

* * *

 _He floated aimlessly in the dark, whispering the same thing over and over again._

 _"I'm still Billy. I'm still Billy. I'm still Billy."_

 _On and on and on, as the darkness seeped into his pores and ate away at his flesh, until finally, there was nothing left of him too._


End file.
